Rhodes swam back to consciousness surrounded by Masks on all sides. He scrambled to sit up and somehow figure out how to fight these things.

“Captain—can you hear me?” Fisher yelled.

“I….I can hear you….” Rhodes staggered to his feet, only to get surrounded by more Masks.

Their mysterious slit eyes stared at him. The light inside shone out with an eerie glow. Did they even see him?

More explosions went off somewhere in the distance. The interface still connected him to his subordinates and their SAMs. All of them got caught in the middle of the battle.

The Grid showed him Legion soldiers fighting hand to hand against the Masks. The soldiers fell all over the place. The Masks outmatched them in strength and firepower. It was no contest.

Rhodes raised his weapon to fire at the Masks nearest him. Some of them had their backs to him while they gunned down Legion soldiers.

Other Masks went after the battalion. Lauer stood not far away. He used his grid lines to multiply his arms, seized dozens of Masks one after the other, and held them in place while he fired Viper after Viper into their heads and bodies.

He detonated the Masks to scrap and dropped their dismembered bodies on the ground at his feet. He worked fast and furiously demolishing every Mask that made the mistake of falling into his grasp.

Rhodes went into a frenzy, raised his scourge guns, and jolted from one side to the other blowing away any Mask in sight.

The Grid responded to him with the speed of thought. It targeted each Mask, locked his weapons on their heads and bodies, and he fired without thinking.

He worked his way through the confusion trying to find….something. That fusion blast scrambled his brain. He had to think so he could decide what to do.

He couldn’t abandon the platoons to their slaughter. He got the idea to circle the platoons to their other side, join forces with them, and drive the Masks back into the valley where the Ravagers could bombard them from space.

The Ravagers couldn’t hit the Masks now, not when they were all jumbled up with Legion soldiers.

He fired five more times and cleared a path through the mayhem. He eliminated enough Masks to spot Rhinehart ahead of him.

Rhinehart had transformed himself into another armored vehicle sprouting weapons from every side. A dozen soldiers took shelter under his other housing while his laser ports, thermal cannons, scourge guns, and seeker missiles went off all around him.

They fired in a steady pounding din of dozens of shots going off every second. The soldiers added their Jackhammers to his defense to hold the Masks at bay.

Rhodes fought his way through the crowd to get closer to Rhinehart’s position. Rhodes planned to add his firepower to Rhinehart’s and hopefully create a bigger defended position where more soldiers could take refuge.

Rhodes made it ten feet before his worst nightmare came true. He kept pivoting his scourge guns back and forth and taking down any Masks in targeting range.

He caught an instant’s glimpse of The Grid. More Masks stopped advancing toward the cities in the distance. They diverted to intercept the battalion instead. Good.

“The Legion is sending in Dusters, Captain!” Fisher reported over the noise. “They’re coming from the south! Get behind the Masks on the north side so the Dusters can target them without hitting the battalion.”

“I’m trying to, pal!” Rhodes called back. “I need you to interface with the rest of the….”

The words died when The Grid changed in front of Rhodes’s eyes. The lines didn’t move much as long as he stayed in one place.

They shouldn’t have moved at all—not unless Rhodes manipulated them for some reason.

Now they moved of their own volition. They spread…and covered Fisher’s face.

Rhodes stared in horror as the grid lines altered Fisher’s appearance. He had never changed his appearance—not since that first day when Dr. Neiland first activated him.

Rhodes felt sick to his stomach when the grid lines reformed into a Mask. Rhodes felt his arms swinging back up and The Grid targeted.

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The same overwhelming, irresistible urge to fire took over. He couldn’t fight it no matter how hard he tried.

His scourge guns swung toward the Legion side and he fired—straight into the platoons he had been trying to protect.

He fought back as hard as he could. He strained every fiber to turn his guns aside, but nothing would break that hold.

His guns jerked from one side to the other exactly the way they did before. The Grid snapped one target to another, but they targeted Legion soldiers this time.

“NO!!” Rhodes bellowed and almost knocked himself over trying to drag his guns away.

Nothing worked. He saw his friends, his comrades, his brothers-in-arms falling in front of his eyes. His own guns blasted their heads off, tore their limbs from their bodies, and sent them flying.

“FISHER—NO!!” Rhodes roared.

Fisher didn’t respond. He wasn’t there anymore. A Mask stared out at Rhodes from The Grid. The Mask’s slit eye glowed exactly like theirs.

“FISHER!!” Rhodes thundered one last time.

He glanced around in hopeless despair. He didn’t even have to look at his targets anymore. His body worked in seamless tandem with The Grid.

Masks replaced every other SAM in the battalion. His subordinates bellowed at their SAMs and fought with all their might to get their own weapons under control.

Vipers released from each person. Those Vipers coiled through the battlefield, completely avoided the Masks, and targeted the thickest clusters of soldiers instead.

Twenty Dusters blasted over the far hills coming in fast. Rhodes cringed when another dozen Vipers released from Oakes’s, Rhinehart’s, and Rhodes’s own ports.

The Vipers smashed into half the Dusters and took them to the ground. Lauer and Dietz started to turn backward to aim their weapons at the remaining Dusters.

Lauer bared his teeth in a feral snarl. He glared down at his own arms and barely managed to pull his weapons in different directions to stop them from shooting at the soldiers.

He couldn’t stop them entirely. He pulled one shot out of ten at the most. The rest hit their targets. He bellowed in rage and despair every time one of his shots hit the soldiers.

Dietz seemed to go into a mindless trance. He stared at nothing in a glazed stupor. He didn’t look at his targets, his weapons, or anything else.

Fuentes had the opposite reaction. He burst into a maniacal grin, laughed out loud, and actually advanced toward the soldiers to get closer to them. He didn’t fight his weapons at all. In fact, he took careful aim to shoot the soldiers.

Thackery didn’t seem to be aware of what she was doing, either. She unleashed a Viper into the 217th and Coulter turned on her.

He roared at her, aimed at her instead, and his weapons jerked themselves away against his will to shoot at the platoons the way the Masks wanted him to.

Rhinehart kept up a steady barrage on the soldiers even as he tried to stop himself from shooting. In the end, he used his own great strength to grasp his own wrist, wrench his scourge gun upward, and he aimed it at his own head.

He fired, but the grid lines surrounding his SAM extended at the last second, seized his arm, and ripped the weapon away in time to save Rhinehart’s life.

He howled in fury, but the grid lines wouldn’t let him shoot at himself a second time.

Oakes and Lauer both tried to take themselves out, but nothing worked. Whatever force took over the battalion always found a way to turn their weapons back on the platoons.

Rhodes couldn’t watch this. He couldn’t be a part of this. He just had to find a way to stop it.

He didn’t have to concentrate on the battle anymore. Fisher—or whatever it was—took possession of Rhodes’s body and his weapons. This Mask fought the battle for Rhodes.

He threw caution to the wind. He had absolutely nothing left to lose. This thing—whatever it was—it used him and his weapons to kill Legion soldiers. He had to find a way to stop it.

He dropped back into The Grid and completely blocked out all sight and sound of the battle around him. None of that mattered anymore.

He lunged for Fisher the way Rhodes fought his SAM on Bao. Rhodes dove headfirst into the grid lines surrounding the Mask face. This wasn’t Fisher. This was an enemy.

Rhodes wrapped his grid lines around the SAM’s lines. Rhodes tangled his grid lines with the SAM’s lines and Rhodes ripped them apart with all his strength.

He didn’t know how to do any of this. He didn’t understand what he was doing. He only knew he wanted to kill whatever took control of Fisher—and the battalion.

Rhodes tore the lines away and spotted a tiny corner of Fisher’s face hidden underneath. The sight gave Rhodes superhuman strength.

He clawed at the lines harder than ever, peeled them away, and tried every trick in the book to tear away whatever was covering Fisher.

The lines sprang back into position just as fast. They repaired themselves and snapped into a grid around Fisher’s face. The mask reformed and locked Fisher inside even stronger than before.

Now Rhodes knew for certain that Fisher was still in there. Rhodes had to free him. Rhodes couldn’t let this monster use Fisher and Rhodes against the Legion.

He clawed at the lines a few more times, but they always bounced back into place. He got three or four away from Fisher before Rhodes had to let them go to grab different lines. He couldn’t win like this.

He sprang back and, without thinking first about what he would do or could do, he projected a Grid outline of himself into the interface.

He didn’t have any color or substance. He was just a shape of himself made out of green grid lines and black squares.

He lunged for the Mask and seized it again. It didn’t have any substance, either. Rhodes’s grid lines grabbed Fisher’s grid lines.

Rhodes didn’t try to tear the grid lines off to reveal the real Fisher underneath. Rhodes already knew that wouldn’t work.

He pinned the Mask down and fired another Viper—a Grid Viper.

This had no substance, either. It was just a projection inside The Grid.

The Viper coiled around to target the Mask. It struggled in Rhodes’s grip. He vented all his frustration and hopeless rage on the thing, slammed it against The Grid, and held it there until the Viper exploded its grid lines apart.

The black squares tore off Fisher’s face and he turned back into the birdlike creature he always had been.

“Captain….” he gasped.

“Not now! We gotta go, Fisher!” Rhodes blasted out of The Grid and back into the battle. He could control all his weapons now.

End of Chapter 36.