Rhodes walked into a different lab. Dr. Osborne might have nine different labs—one for each member of the battalion.

Or only eight now. Rhodes didn’t ask what the Legion did with Georgie Henshaw’s body—and her implants. Did it ever cross any of their minds to destroy the implants to stop them from regenerating into another version of the Masks?

All the other invasion forces threatening the Treaty of Aemon Cluster could be bastardized species of SAMs, too. Anything was possible after what Rhodes and his people discovered on Bao.

He was getting insatiably curious to find out about these rouge SAMs. Where did they come from? How did they operate? He would probably never find out.

He had other things on his mind right now. He approached the only capsule in the room. Lauer lay asleep inside it.

Osborne and Trudeau worked on their computer equipment. Trudeau never mentioned again if he got Dr. Osborne to check Dietz’s criminal record. Neither of them mentioned it and neither did Rhodes.

He no longer honestly cared what Dietz’s background might be. As far as Rhodes was concerned, Dietz’s history before he joined Battalion 1 was no more relevant or concerning than Henshaw’s, Fuentes’s, or Thackery’s.

He really didn’t care where any of them came from as long as they held up their end of the bargain on the battlefield.

So far, all of them did exactly that. Even Dietz did it. He did it exceptionally well. Rhodes couldn’t ask for anything else.

The capsule cover opened. Osborne came over to Lauer’s bedside and worked on the controls there.

Rhodes stayed out of the way. He wasn’t here to help Lauer wake up.

Rhodes had one job here—to interface between Fisher, Wild, and Lauer. If the four of them recognized each other as friends and could talk to each other without trying to blow each other’s brains out, that would be another win.

Lauer groaned and swiveled his head back and forth on the pillow without opening his eyes. “Where am I?”

“You’re in a lab on the Ravager Ero,” Dr. Osborne told him. “You’ve been in stasis. Captain Corban Rhodes is here to talk to you about what happened between Dietz and Henshaw.”

Lauer snarled under his breath. “What is there to talk about?”

“I need to interface between you and Wild,” Rhodes interrupted. “I need you and Wild to talk to me and Fisher through the interface to make sure we don’t malfunction the way we did before.”

Lauer snorted and passed his hand across his face. “Shoot me now.”

Rhodes had to chuckle. He bent down and clamped his hand on Lauer’s shoulder. “We aren’t there yet, but if it comes to that, I promise I will.”

He activated the interface without asking any further permission. Wild was already there in front of Lauer’s eyes.

The skull swiveled around to glare at Rhodes—but that was always Wild’s everyday facial expression. “Captain….” the skull rasped.

“Do you recognize me and Fisher, Wild?” Rhodes asked. “You don’t consider us your enemies?”

“Of course not,” Wild husked. “I remember everything from that disaster in the capsule hold. I don’t know why I targeted all of you.” He turned back to Lauer. “Thank you for stopping me, Lieutenant.”

“Hey, we all malfunction, don’t we?” Lauer dragged his eyes open and looked up at Rhodes. Lauer also glanced at Wild and Fisher through the interface. “Can we execute Dietz now?”

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“No, not yet.”

Lauer grumbled under his breath. “You’re way too nice, Captain.”

Rhodes found himself beaming at Lauer. Rhodes might even have started to consider Lauer a friend. “I’ll let you know when the time comes.”

“Oh, I’ll know when the time comes,” Lauer muttered. “When the time comes, I won’t ask you for permission.”

“It’s a deal.” Rhodes turned to Osborne. “Is he clear to come back to the hold now?”

Osborne nodded. “When he’s strong enough to walk. We’ll keep waking up one person each day until we get back to Coleridge Station.”

Rhodes stood around waiting for Lauer to stand up. He hobbled slowly and painfully back to the capsule hold where he immediately laid down on his mattress.

“I don’t know why I’m lying down. More sleep will only make me feel worse.”

“You’ll feel better, now that you’re out of stasis.”

Lauer looked around. “This place is too quiet. It doesn’t feel the same without the others.” He looked down at his hands. “It won’t be the same without Georgie. I always knew we’d lose someone. I just never thought it would be her.”

“Yeah, I didn’t expect to go this long without losing someone.”

“I wish it had been someone else—Fuentes or Dietz or someone like that. That’s pretty messed up, isn’t it? It had to be her—the nicest person in the whole battalion.”

“It isn’t messed up,” Rhodes replied. “I guess it’s just as well, though. She never belonged in the battalion. Now she can rest in peace the way she should have before she came here.”

Lauer nodded down at his hands. “I guess it’s that way for all of us. We’re just ghosts walking around. None of us is really alive.”

Rhodes gripped his shoulder again and headed for the table. He’d gotten Dr. Osborne to locate some paper and pencils so Rhodes could work on his art.

“Get some rest,” Rhodes told Lauer. “We can talk when you wake up.”

Lauer struggled to sit up. “No, I want to sit with you at the table. I want to get back into something like a normal routine.”

“You’re more than welcome.” Rhodes sat down and picked up his pencil. “Did you have a hobby before this?”

“Apart from fighting in the Legion? I was really into riding horses when I was younger. I used to take my wife and kids riding when I went home on leave.”

Rhodes’s head shot up before he thought to stop himself. He immediately corrected by looking back down at his piece of paper to hide his surprise.

Lauer never talked about his family. He never even mentioned that he had a wife and kids before this.

Rhodes always assumed Lauer did, but Rhodes had long since given up ever getting any personal information out of Lauer, especially not anything as personal as this.

Rhodes made a split-second decision to keep the mood light by playing it off as well as he could. “So what kind of horse-riding did you do—dressage?”

Lauer exploded in laughter. It was one of the few real laughs Rhodes had heard since this whole nightmare started. “Rodeo, actually. I used to compete before I joined the Legion, but I used to take my family trail-riding. Horse-packing, you might call it. We’d load up the horses and go trekking through the wilderness for two weeks at a time.”

“That sounds fun.” Rhodes passed his pencil across his page. “My kids would have been tearing my eyes out within an hour if I tried to pull something like that.”

Lauer laughed again. “You have to train ‘em young. What did yours like to do?”

“They were into competitive sports—swimming, track, basketball—that kind of thing. I guess they still are into it. They’re out there competing right now while I’m stuck in here. I guess I can be happy about that.” He finished his sketch and pushed it across the table. “Here. This is for you.”

Lauer rotated the paper around to look at Rhodes’s drawing. He’d been planning to draw a bouquet of flowers in a vase.

He changed it at the last minute when Lauer mentioned his family going horseback riding.

Rhodes changed the vase and bouquet into a tree, added a landscape, and finally penciled in a bunch of people riding horses through the mountains.

A beautiful ray of light broke across Lauer’s grizzled face when he saw the picture. “Captain….” he croaked. “This is incredible! Thank you so much! I….I don’t know what to say.”

“Don’t say anything. I’m honored that you told me about your family.”

Lauer didn’t reply. He compressed his lips holding back emotion while he stared deep into the drawing.

It wasn’t one of Rhodes’s best. He didn’t even plan it out. He never dreamed it would have such a profound effect on Lauer.

Lauer stared at the picture in silence for a minute until tears welled up in his one eye. He struggled to control his lips.

He was still staring at it with far-off longing when he stood up, crossed the hold to his capsule, and stuck the picture to the inside surface of the cover—right where he would be able to see the picture before he went to sleep and after he woke up.

He stretched out on the mattress, closed the cover, and lay there staring at the picture for a long time—much longer than he needed to. He eventually started his conversion cycle and fell asleep.

“That was incredible, Captain,” Fisher remarked after Lauer fell asleep.

“It wasn’t even that great a drawing,” Rhodes pointed out. “I just spat it out on the spur of the moment.”

“I mean Lauer’s reaction. I never thought a simple drawing would mean so much to him.”

“Neither did I. If I had known, I would have given it to him long ago.”

End of Chapter 32.