Dr. Osbourne went down the line of capsules tapping on one control panel after another. The readings changed and the covers opened.
Rhodes, Rhinehart, Oakes, and Dietz lined up and watched Lauer, Thackery, Henshaw, Fuentes, and Coulter start to stir.
They groaned, rubbed their heads, and asked where they were. The two doctors explained it to them.
They eventually sat up enough to look around and see their comrades standing there waiting for them.
Lauer heaved a heavy sigh. “Captain! I thought you were dead.”
“No such luck, Lieutenant.”
Lauer snorted. “Maybe we all would have been better off.”
Osborne walked away. “Everything seems to be functioning within normal parameters. You can take the battalion back to the capsule hold. We’ll be landing at Coleridge Station in a few days. Once we get there, we’ll run some more tests to find out what caused you all to malfunction on the battlefield. You can rest and recover until then.”
He and Trudeau left. Lauer glared after them. “Who the hell are they?”
“Two new doctors on the Battalion 1 project,” Rhodes replied. “They seem like they’re all right.”
“They aren’t all right if they’re doctors on the Battalion 1 project,” Lauer snarled. “They’ll just screw things up the same as ever.”
“I’m sure things are screwed up enough on their own, Lieutenant,” Rhodes replied. “Come on. Let’s get out of here.”
He checked each person and each SAM, but Osborne was right. Everyone seemed to be working the way they should.
The five patients got painfully to their feet and hobbled back to the capsule hold where they all went straight back to their capsules.
Rhodes and Rhinehart joined Dietz and Oakes at the table. “What have you two been doing to occupy your time while the rest of us have been asleep?” Rhodes asked.
Oakes shrugged. “Not much of anything. There isn’t a lot to do around here—the same way there isn’t a lot to do at Coleridge Station.”
“I’ve been keeping track of my family through the terminal,” Dietz replied. “I might not be able to communicate with them, but I can keep an eye on them from afar. It’s better than nothing.”
Rhodes glanced over at him. Rhodes realized in that moment that he’d never taken the time to find out if Dietz even had a family.
Why wouldn’t he? He must have some relatives out there somewhere.
Why did Rhodes go out of his way to dehumanize Dietz? Rhodes didn’t understand himself.
He’d been too consumed with finding everything wrong with Diez even to ask the most obvious question.
Rhinehart stared at Dietz, too. “Damn, man! Good idea! Why didn’t I think of that? I should have checked on them before. I could have been seeing everything they’re doing!”
Oakes grimaced and looked away. “I don’t know how you can stand it. I can’t look. I don’t want to see what they’re doing. It’s bad enough just knowing they’re out there.”
“The system loads up pictures and everything,” Dietz added. “It’s the next best thing to being there.”
“But it isn’t being there,” Oakes argued. “We can never be there ever again. How do you live with that?”
Dietz shrugged. “I wasn’t there when I was deployed with the Legion, either. I lived through pictures from home and watching them on the terminals. It isn’t so much different now. We sent letters back and forth—but not very often. I can trick myself into thinking I just sent them a letter and it’s been a while and they just don’t have time to write back—or they already wrote me and I don’t have time to write back. It’s not that much different.”
“It’s different,” Oakes snarled. “It’s very different.”
“No one is asking you to look,” Rhodes told him. “If you don’t want to look, don’t look.”
Oakes turned on him. “I don’t see you looking.”
Now it was Rhodes’s turn to look away. “No, I couldn’t look.”
Oakes waved at Rhodes and pointed at Dietz. “You see? I’m not the only one. Do you think I want to see my wife getting together with another man? Do you think I want to see obituaries for my parents dying and school reports of my son getting in trouble for getting in fights?”
“So you’re just gonna live without it?” Dietz asked. “How do you live with that?”
Oakes glared at him for a split second, stood up, and stormed out of the hold. He switched off the interface so none of the others could see where he was going.
Rhinehart sat silently through the whole argument. Dietz glanced over at Rhodes. “It isn’t like he can say I’m doing anything wrong by looking.”
“No, you aren’t. I can’t fault you for wanting to stay in touch, even from a distance. You keep doing your own thing. He’ll deal with it in his own way.”
“Or not,” Rhinehart murmured.
“Just do what you gotta do.” Rhodes stood up. “It’s going to be hard on all of us. Just do whatever you have to do to cope with it. None of us can ask for anything better than that.”
He would have liked to leave the hold, but he didn’t want to go anywhere near the Ero crew.
Their reaction—or non-reaction—unnerved Rhodes more than the soldiers’ hostility. He would rather have someone outright hating him than ignoring him and pretending he didn’t exist.
Oakes was right. There was just as little to do here as anywhere else. Dietz went back to work on the terminal. Oakes returned half an hour later and went back to writing something on a piece of paper.
Rhinehart went into The Grid where Rocky showed him a detailed schematic of all Rhinehart’s implants.
They held a long, complicated conversation about how all Rhinehart’s components worked, how the fusion generator fed power to Rhinehart’s implants, and how it reproduced Rhinehart’s weapons so fast.
Rhodes should have listened. He’d always wondered about this stuff, but he couldn’t get interested in it.
It would have been more accurate to say the subject made him sick. The revulsion and fury he felt when he first woke up—it started to creep back into his soul.
He didn’t realize it until he and the rest of the battalion woke up from their next conversion cycle.
Thackery, Henshaw, Coulter, Lauer, and Fuentes woke up, too. The whole battalion was back together again.
Rhodes sat on the edge of his capsule and stared at his mechanical feet. He hated them. He hated everything about this life. He hated himself most of all.
Being this half-robot infuriated him. How dare the Legion do this to him?
He seethed in silent fury….and then he realized. He’d been calm yesterday. He’d been fine while he visited his subordinates in the lab. He didn’t hate himself then—not any more than he already did.
He stood up and turned from right to left. The feeling didn’t go away.
He wanted to destroy something. He wanted to pulverize every one of these capsules and tear each of his subordinates apart to stop this project before it got any worse.
This hold didn’t have a washroom, so he crossed the room to the terminal desk. No one was using it.
He sat down and programmed it to make the screen a reflective surface. He stared at his reflection.
If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
The sight of his implants sent him into a rage. He stood up so fast that he kicked the chair over.
He didn’t bother to pick it up. He stormed across the hold and paced back and forth. He had to get rid of this rage somehow.
He scrambled for some way to do it safely. He couldn’t come up with any idea other than going to the training room and going into some Grid battle scenario.
Not even that would satisfy him. Nothing would satisfy him other than killing everyone involved in this project.
Fisher expanded himself in front of Rhodes’s eyes. “Good morning, Captain. I trust you had a good conversion cycle.”
“Something’s wrong, Fisher,” Rhodes snarled through gritted teeth. “I’m having an emotional disturbance.”
Fisher cocked his head. “I’m not detecting any malfunction….”
“WILL YOU STOP SAYING THAT?!!” Rhodes thundered.
Everyone else in the hold jumped, spun around, and stared at him. Rhodes wheeled away, but there was nowhere to go. He was stuck with this.
His fury broke his ability to control it and he lashed out for a split second before he found a way to stop himself. He punched his fist at the only target available.
His knuckles smashed the concrete wall next to him. That impact brought him back from the brink just enough to stop himself from hitting anything else.
He would have liked to smash the whole Ero to pieces. He would have liked to kill everyone on board.
This rage bursting out of him right now—it just kept escalating. It built with every passing second.
He clenched his teeth and snarled in a deadly undertone. He didn’t trust himself to speak any louder than that. “I’m telling you something’s wrong,” he muttered.
“I believe you, Captain,” Fisher replied in his calmest, most soothing murmur. “I’m alerting Dr. Osborne. He’s on his way now.”
Rhodes clamped his mouth shut to stop himself from answering. He didn’t trust Dr. Osborne nor did Rhodes trust himself around Dr. Osborne.
Thank the stars that Dr. Neiland, Dr. Irvine, nor Dr. Montague was here—or General Brewster. Rhodes really would have lost it on any of them.
“Your stress levels are reading somewhat similarly to what they were when you first came online at Coleridge Station,” Fisher informed him while they waited. “They’re elevated, but they’re still within normal parameters.”
“They aren’t within normal parameters!” Rhodes spat.
“I realize that, Captain,” Fisher breathed. “I’m sure the doctors will do everything possible to eliminate the cause of the stress.”
Rhodes already knew they wouldn’t. They would have to remove his implants to eliminate the cause of the stress.
He didn’t say that out loud. Rhinehart, Oakes, and Lauer gathered around Rhodes. “What’s wrong, Captain?” Lauer asked.
“I’m malfunctioning,” Rhodes growled through gritted teeth. “Fisher called Dr. Osborne.”
Rhinehart accessed the interface and immediately switched it off when he felt Rhodes’s fury. “Holy shit! This is bad!”
“If one of us is malfunctioning, we can expect others to malfunction, too,” Oakes decided. “We’re going to have to keep a close eye on things.”
“Maybe this has something to do with the delay when Fisher came back online,” Rhinehart suggested. “Fisher was the only SAM who suffered a delay. Maybe this will stay isolated to the captain.”
“I’m not detecting any malfunction in my programming,” Fisher remarked.
Thackery, Henshaw, Fuentes, and Coulter gathered around, too, but just then, Drs. Osborne and Trudeau rolled in.
Rhodes had to fight himself all the way down the corridor to the lab. “It’s getting worse,” he snarled through locked teeth. “You might need to take me offline.”
Osborne paused in the middle of the corridor and raised his device. He opened his mouth to say, “I don’t think that’s necessary…..”
Rhodes overreacted again, seized the doctor by the elbow, and marched him the rest of the way to the lab.
Rhodes saw himself acting violently toward the one man who was supposed to be helping him. Rhodes couldn’t stop himself, though.
Rhodes felt the last shreds of his self-control starting to disintegrate. He shoved Osborne into the lab a lot harder than he should have.
Osborne stumbled once and spun around to confront Rhodes—as if Osborne would be able to stop Rhodes if he did try something.
Trudeau hung back out of range and stared at Rhodes with huge eyes.
Osborne tried to play it off and waved toward the stool next to his computer components. “Take a seat, Captain. We can work this out.”
Rhodes ignored the gesture and crossed instead to the capsule standing on the other side of the room. It was the same capsule Rhodes had been using while he was in stasis.
He sat down and started to stretch out. “What are you doing, Captain?” Osborne asked. “You don’t need to go into another conversion cycle.”
“I’m going to kill someone if I stay like this.” Rhodes waved him away. “Get to work and fix it. I don’t care what you have to do. Take me offline if you have to. You’ll be able to do it quicker if I’m like this.”
The prongs stabbed into Rhodes’s head and back. He wilted in relief when they locked him in place. He couldn’t go anywhere now.
He could have unlocked himself if he really wanted to, but he finally got the message across to the two doctors.
They gaped at him in horrified disbelief for a second and then attacked their machines.
Trudeau made the first move by immobilizing Rhodes. He wouldn’t be able to get up now even if he wanted to.
Fisher kept rotating right and left looking at nothing on Rhodes’s internal Grid. “I’m still not detecting any unusual brain wave patterns.”
“Maybe the problem is in your programming,” Rhodes muttered. “Did you ever think of that, pal?”
Osborne turned around and raised his eyebrows. “What programming?”
Rhodes had to take a deep, steadying breath before he trusted himself to speak. “Check Fisher’s programming functions first. He didn’t come back online when I woke up from my second conversion cycle. He was offline for almost twenty minutes and he didn’t remember me coming out of stasis. Maybe the malfunction is with him.”
“I think I found the problem,” Trudeau announced without turning around. “The SAM’s interface with your behavioral protocol is feeding back on itself. It’s only supposed to allow him to monitor your emotional state for any disturbance. Now it’s feeding back and causing the disturbance he’s supposed to detect.”
“That explains why he can’t detect it,” Rhodes muttered.
Fisher cocked his head to one side. “Are you sure about this, Captain? I don’t like the doctors tinkering with my programming.”
“Now you know how I feel, pal,” Rhodes snarled.
“I’m removing the distortion and correcting the feedback,” Trudeau reported. “Let me know if it gets any better.”
It did. The rage started to fade and Rhodes sank back on the mattress with a shuddering sigh.
The feeling of wanting to wreck something didn’t go away, though—not completely. It dwindled to a low, simmering resentment against everyone and everything involved in this project, including Rhodes himself.
Trudeau finally turned around to study Rhodes. “Is that any better?”
Rhodes couldn’t look at this kid. “I guess so.”
“Do you feel like sitting up, Captain?” Osborne asked.
Rhodes didn’t want to sit up. He didn’t want to do anything. He hated everything about this.
Did that hatred come from Fisher’s malfunction—or just from the nightmarish reality itself? How could this resentment ever go away when Rhodes really did resent the project?
He couldn’t stay in this lab for the rest of his life, so he sat up on the edge of the capsule.
He was just about to push himself to his feet when a high-pitched scream stabbed him in the brain.
In a split second, all the other SAMs interfaced with him. The battalion had slackened their habit of always staying interfaced with each other to keep an eye on each other.
Everyone in the battalion had been on constant watch for any malfunction. All of that went out the window when they got injured on Sulia.
Waking up from such a long conversion cycle broke the routine. Everyone stayed out of each other’s heads while each person went through their own personal recovery.
Now all the SAMs burst into Rhodes’s head in an instant—and they all malfunctioned at the same time.
Henshaw kept screaming in Rhodes’s ear. Each of the SAMs malfunctioned in a different way. Each malfunction affected that individual differently.
Keon’s grid lines kept twisting across his face, distorting the SAM’s panda appearance, reforming, and smearing somewhere else.
Henshaw collapsed on her knees in the capsule hold, clutched her head, and screamed herself hoarse every time Keon’s grid lines changed his appearance.
Rocky bared his teeth and snarled at Rhinehart through The Grid. The horse head sprouted fangs and its eyes stretched upward into two glowing red slits.
Rocky bared his teeth at Rhinehart until he backed away. He bumped into the wall, but he couldn’t get away from his murderous SAM.
Oakes projected a Grid copy of himself into the interface. The lines that formed the copy’s outline snatched Dash out of thin air and the two figures wrestled, yanked, and fought each other inside The Grid.
Coulter collapsed on the hold floor spasming, twitching, and convulsing in pain. Murphy hovered there in space watching Coulter howling in torment. Murphy didn’t react. He didn’t do a thing to intervene or to help Coulter.
Fuentes huddled in a ball the way he did when he first woke up. He sat on the table, pulled his knees to his chest, and cast terrified glances at the rest of the battalion.
Crushing fear, self-hatred, and revulsion flooded Rhodes coming from Fuentes. Van hovered in front of his eyes yelling at him in some language Rhodes couldn’t understand. It didn’t sound like any Preinean language he’d ever heard before.
Rhodes tried not to see all his subordinates suffering these catastrophic malfunctions all at the same time.
His hands flew to his head, but the agony and torture overwhelming each of them rushed back on him. He grimaced as all their pain and distress hit him full force.
He’d never shared his subordinates’ thoughts or emotions like this. Now it all poured through the interface. He felt everything as if it came from himself.
Trudeau rushed him. “What’s wrong?”
“They’re malfunctioning!” Rhodes choked and groaned as a torrential wave of physical pain smashed into him. It came from Coulter.
Osborne sprang back to his controls. “Who is malfunctioning?”
“All of them!” Rhodes fought to breathe. “They’re……” He broke off in a scream of terror coming from Henshaw.
Osborne and Trudeau scrambled over their machines. “I’m not picking up anything….” Osborne began.
Rhodes cut him off with a roar as Dash overcame Oakes’s grid lines. Dash extended his own lines to surround Oakes, wrestled him to the floor, and Dash started throttling Oakes to a bloody pulp.
Dash expanded to a huge size. His grid lines stretched and formed whipping alien limbs that strangled Oakes, pounded him into the floor, and started burrowing into Oakes’s mouth.
“Shut them down!” Rhodes bellowed. “Shut them down now!”
“WHO!!” Osborne yelled back.
“All of them! Shut down all of them—NOW!”
Trudeau hovered in front of Rhodes’s eyes trying to examine him. Rhodes barely saw him, and right at that moment, Fisher transformed in front of Rhodes’s face.
Fisher had been hanging there in his usual place. Now he morphed into a monster as hideous as any Rhodes had ever seen. Fisher grew fangs, his eyes stretched out to become pointed slits, and he rushed Rhodes with all those teeth bared.
Rhodes screamed again and reared back to get away from the SAM. The next minute, another catastrophic surge of fury seized Rhodes. This dwarfed anything he experienced before.
He lunged for the SAM to kill it no matter what. Rhodes broke away from the prongs holding him down, shot out his arms, and levitated off the bed trying to seize Fisher before the SAM killed him first.
Rhodes became distantly aware in some other part of his brain that his mechanical hands were closing on Trudeau instead.
At that moment, something happened outside Rhodes’s awareness and he lost consciousness completely.
End of Chapter 7.