Captain Corban Rhodes fired his boosters to rocket across the landscape on the planet Niarus. Explosions detonated all around him. He had to dodge columns of fire, burning shrapnel, and gunshots coming from every direction.
Green grid lines covered the terrain below him and all around him. The lines adjusted their angles over hills, valleys, and the hulks of downed ships.
The Grid fed him information about enemy and friendly positions, weapons placements dotting the surrounding terrain, and enemy vessels swooping in to gun him down.
A fast-moving, arrow-shaped craft with a long, thin, pointed nose shrieked past him going a million miles an hour. He swerved to avoid it and wound up flying into plasma shots pelting at him from more of the same kind of craft.
They raced behind their leader and scattered gunshots at Battalion 1. Lieutenant Dane Rhinehart started to pull up and swung his scourge guns forward to take aim at the enemy ships.
“Keep going!” Rhodes ordered. “We have to get to the objective before they bring out reinforcements!”
“Here comes the next wave!” Lieutenant Ted Oakes called from farther down the line.
The battalion flew a hundred feet over a vast grassland marked off by wooded riverbeds.
Aemon Legion platoons held a defensive line near one of the rivers. Armored enemy tanks rumbled across the grassland and fired booming cannon fire at the platoons in the distance.
Swarms of aliens poured across the fields and aimed their plasma rifles to mow the platoons down. One wave after another surged from the enemy side.
The platoons cut down each wave with deadly precision. Legion Dusters and Predator craft buzzed back and forth overhead.
They carpet-bombed the aliens from above, but a small fraction of the alien horde survived each wave. They fought their way closer under their tanks’ protection.
Rhodes tore his attention away from them. He couldn’t help the platoons except by accomplishing the battalion’s objective.
He turned back toward the alien horde—toward the aliens’ giant battle cruisers landing in the far rear on the alien side.
The Grid read those ships from miles away and returned more information than Rhodes could possibly process—not consciously.
One of the battle cruisers flashed red on The Grid. Fisher’s face rotated to one side in front of Rhodes’s sight.
“The plasma nucleus is located five feet under the cruiser’s left wing,” Fisher told him. “All you have to do is hit the nucleus. You’ll shut down the tanks, the cruisers, and the aliens’ plasma rifles. They’ll retreat off the field and the platoons will be able to advance.”
“What if they don’t retreat?” Rhodes asked. “What do we really know about these aliens?”
“They’re unknown. We’ve never seen them in the Treaty of Aemon Cluster before.”
Rhodes looked up at his SAM. “That’s impossible. They couldn’t just have materialized here.”
“Fly lower toward the ground. We can scan them and check them against the Legion database.”
“Going lower will put us in danger from their rifles—and from the tanks,” Lieutenant Heath Lauer pointed out. “We’re safer up here.”
“Checking what kind of aliens they are won’t help us accomplish the objective,” Alyssa Thackery chimed in. “We should keep going.”
“You’re right. Let’s go,” Rhodes replied. “We have enough to do trying to destroy that cruiser.”
“The other cruisers are launching!” Fisher reported. “It’s now or never!”
Rhodes gunned his boosters and sprinted across the battlefield to close on the enemy cruisers. The rest of Battalion 1 surrounded him, but the cruisers saw them coming.
Ten of them launched off the ground and plunged in gunning for the battalion. Green grid lines spread over Rhodes’s body and he changed his shape into a small, fast Predator.
He wheeled aside and fired his Viper missiles at the enemy cruisers. They activated some kind of plasma shield that surrounded each vessel. The Vipers exploded against this shield and did no damage.
The battalion’s target cruiser launched, too, but it didn’t join the battle. It turned away and flew farther toward the rear—away from the battalion.
The other cruisers boxed in the battalion to occupy Rhodes and his subordinates. None of them could go after the target ship.
Of course the enemy knew to protect the one ship carrying their plasma nucleus. The whole battle would end once the battalion hit that ship. The aliens would protect it at all costs.
Rhodes banked lower to get behind the other cruisers, but they kept buzzing into his path. Aliens on the ground turned their plasma rifles upward to shoot at the battalion from below.
“Fuentes—go after that ship!” Rhodes ordered. “We’ll tie them up for you!”
“Yes, Sir,” Corporal Rudy Fuentes called from the other side of the Battalion 1 formation.
It wasn’t even a formation anymore. Everyone used The Grid to change themselves, too.
Sergeant Jairo Dietz dove down below the cruisers, changed into a Striker-class fighter craft, and unleashed dozens of thin snaking arms. They punched through the enemy cruisers’ hulls, targeted their engines, and destroyed four of them.
Dietz opened a space for Fuentes to dive past. He changed into a Striker, too, except this one was much longer and thinner than the ships assigned to Battalion 1.
Corporal Eddie Coulter tightened himself into a ball that deflected all plasma shots. They bounced off his smooth sides and ricocheted away to hit other cruisers.
The ball smashed into a different cruiser, bounced off, and spun somewhere else. It zoomed back and forth across the battlefield tearing off cruisers’ wings, imploding their engines, and smashing through their hulls before it soared off somewhere else.
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Lauer and Rhinehart worked together. They both changed into Predators, circled the battle, and came back together from either side.
The enemy cruisers flanked outward to confront the two ships. At the last minute before Lauer and Rhinehart collided in a devastating mid-air explosion, they both altered their grid lines.
Grid lines covered both Predators, stretched their outlines into surreal versions of their original ships, and blasted between the cruisers before the enemy could hit anything.
Both Predators flattened themselves into long, low sheets of shiny metal. They didn’t have cockpits big enough for a person to sit inside.
They skated inches away from each other and they both fired outward at the same time. They hit the cruisers from behind and underneath, changed back into Predators, and charged away to escape into the sky.
The fire from those exploding cruisers joined in one combusting ball of plasma. It consumed five more nearby cruisers, but more enemy attackers gathered from all over to fight the battalion.
Fuentes raced away across the landscape. A dozen enemy cruisers tried to split off to go after him. Rhodes couldn’t let them catch up with Fuentes—not with the battalion’s objective in sight.
He took a page from Dietz’s playbook and fired his Vipers, but instead of missiles, he released a long chain from the end of each projectile.
The Vipers smashed into the cruisers’ hulls and anchored there. Rhodes soared upward into the sky dragging the cruisers with him.
They tried to gun their engines to pull away, but he grappled his grid lines around them to overpower them. He flew around the other cruisers, swung his captured enemies in a wide arc, and smashed them into each other.
Explosions erupted all over the battlefield. Rhodes’s maneuver cleared the way for the battalion to catch up with Fuentes and support him to destroy the nucleus ship.
A yell distracted Rhodes from reading the rest of the battle. He checked The Grid just in time to see Fuentes going down under a combined barrage from twenty cruisers. They surrounded him while the nucleus ship raced away to safety.
Rhodes didn’t stick around long enough to make sure he subdued the rest of the cruisers. He blasted his boosters, took off at high speed, and interfaced with the rest of the battalion.
“I’m coming for you, Rudy!” he called. “Just hold on!”
“The nucleus ship is landing on that mountainside, Captain!” Fuentes’s SAM Van reported. “Rudy and I can hold the cruisers here! Go after the nucleus ship! It’s our only way to end the battle in our favor.”
Rhodes didn’t want to leave Fuentes in danger. The rest of the battalion was too busy fighting other cruisers.
The battle descended closer to the ground. That brought the battalion within range of the aliens’ plasma rifle.
Gunshots pelted out of the enemy horde to bombard Lauer, Oakes, and Coulter. They had to stop fighting the cruisers to shoot back at the aliens on the ground—but the battalion couldn’t stop fighting. They had to keep fighting just to save their own lives.
Fuentes roared again when he smashed down on the mountainside. Aliens surrounded him from all directions, swarmed over him, and buried him under a mountain of bodies.
His grid lines changed. He transformed himself into a raging monster with dozens of arms, each one spouting one of his prototype weapons. He reared out of the horde shooting with all his might, but he couldn’t escape.
Rhodes made a snap decision, turned his back on the nucleus ship, and dove for Fuentes.
Rhodes opened fire before he got there. He swiped his lasers and thermal cannons back and forth across the horde carving hundreds of aliens to pieces, but he still couldn’t get close enough to free Fuentes.
Rhodes landed on the grass a dozen yards away. All the aliens surrounded Fuentes. They kept their backs to Rhodes.
He opened fire on them again and carved a path halfway to Fuentes’s position. He kept roaring, rising out of the mound, and gunning for doomsday.
Rhodes stormed closer. He didn’t mess around with fancy Grid theatrics now. He fired again and again, passed his lasers back and forth across the enemy horde, and finally got close enough to see Fuentes in the chaos.
Rhodes unloaded ten Vipers on the crowd and raised his arms to open fire with his scourge guns. These aliens might be able to use plasma shields on their battle cruisers. They wouldn’t be able to use any kind of shield to protect their bodies.
He fired five times before they turned around to face him….and his blood ran cold when he saw their faces.
The fog of battle stopped him from seeing them before. The Grid should have shown him what they looked like before now. He might have been too distracted to check that, but something told him there must be another reason why he didn’t check.
The aliens faced him and he knew for certain in that moment that he’d never seen this species before. He’d never even heard of them—because they didn’t exist.
They had a huge, hulking frame with bulging muscles and massive heads. One black pit in the center of the forehead took the place of eyes.
A round, lipless mouth yawned out of the lower part of the face. Angular, jointed limbs too long for their bodies clutched their plasma rifles with three thick, beefy fingers.
Each alien roared at Rhodes out of that disgusting mouth. The sound set his hair on end.
He braced himself to fight them. He was all alone on the ground with no one coming to help him.
None of the rest of the battalion could get near the ground with so many cruisers gathering from all over the battlefield.
An explosion went off somewhere. Five cruisers surrounded Oakes and shot him down. He’d been flying around as a Striker.
He smashed into the ground half a mile away and the aliens overwhelmed him, too. Rhodes couldn’t help any of his subordinates nor could they help him. None of them could go after the nucleus ship.
“The nucleus ship is launching into the atmosphere, Captain!” Fisher called. “The aliens are getting away! We won’t be able to accomplish our objective if we don’t go after the nucleus ship now!”
Fuentes bellowed again and went down under another tide of these mysterious creatures—except that they weren’t mysterious.
Rhodes took a split second to read the whole battle on The Grid. It really was hopeless…..but his attention kept coming back to the aliens.
He definitely would have remembered these aliens if they existed. They never invaded Niarus.
Rhodes fought the Emal on Niarus. The planet had been peaceful for generations before the Emal invasion.
His mind went into a tailspin trying to understand all this—but only for a fraction of a second. He didn’t travel through time or magically vanish into another dimension.
Whoever and whatever these aliens were, they weren’t real. None of this was real.
He glanced around him. Grid lines covered the whole landscape, and as soon as he thought that, grid lines covered all the aliens, the tanks, the battle cruisers, the mountainsides—everything. He was inside The Grid.
The scene changed in a single thought. The Grid vanished. The battle vanished along with it—but the battalion didn’t vanish.
An impossible force seized Rhodes by the back of the head. His body went rigid. He couldn’t move. Everything stopped—except for his awareness of what was happening to him.
He locked into place with seven prongs sticking into his shoulders, his hips, his feet, and one in the back of his cranial implant.
The Grid stayed active—active enough for him to see and understand exactly where he was. He stood in the center of a metal room covered all over the walls with electronic equipment.
The prongs stuck out of a steel plate behind him. It held him against it in a standing position. Seven more identical stations formed a line on his left.
Each of his subordinates stood locked into those stations. The prongs held them in place so none of them could move.
Just for an instant, the memory of that battle inside The Grid overlaid this experience except that this was real. The battle had been a simulated Grid landscape like the training sessions the battalion used at Coleridge Station.
This wasn’t Coleridge Station—not by a million miles. The battalion entered those landscapes freely and left them freely.
Rhodes and his subordinates never entered any Grid landscape through a conversion cycle. He had to be in a conversion cycle now. Wasn’t he? Why else would he be locked into these prongs?
He wasn’t in a conversion cycle now. He was wide awake and very aware of everything going on around him. He stood up instead of lying in a safe, comfortable, protective capsule in the Coleridge Station barracks.
Just in case he somehow forgot what happened to him and his people during the battle on Rono, at that moment, one of the robot Masks walked up to him and tapped a control panel next to his station.
The robot’s one slit eye glowed out at him. Its metal helmet bore an eerie resemblance to the battalion’s implants.
The whole terrible memory came back with unstoppable force. The Masks captured Battalion 1 on the battlefield. Now Rhodes and his subordinates were the Masks’ prisoners.
End of Chapter 1.