Rhodes stepped out of the barn and squinted into the sunshine. It was definitely morning now.

He stretched the kinks out of his back and shoulders on his way back into town. Sleeping on a pile of hay in a barn wasn’t the most comfortable way to spend the night.

He considered how to explain this to Fisher and the others—if they found out. Talking to Fisher about The Grid was more important.

Rhodes dreaded Fisher’s reaction. The Masks must have somehow erased Fisher’s awareness of everything that happened outside The Grid.

Rhodes headed back to the house that Fisher said belonged to Rhodes. Rhodes didn’t see the woman or her children.

He did see Fisher. Fisher stood outside his own house pouring a bucket of water over his own head.

He’d stripped his shirt to the waist so Rhodes got an eyeful of how big, strapping, and muscular Fisher was. He stood four inches taller than Rhodes. Fisher could have broken Rhodes in half if he wanted to.

Rhodes waited until Fisher stopped shaking the water out of his hair. Fisher laughed when he opened his eyes and saw Rhodes standing there. “Did you have a good night?” Fisher asked.

Rhodes dipped his chin once. “Pretty good. You?”

“It was great. So where did you sleep last night?”

Rhodes jerked his head sideways. “In the barn down there.”

Fisher only nodded. “I thought you might. You’re such a traditionalist.”

Rhodes let that go. He didn’t need to explain himself to this guy—whoever the hell this was. “So what’s the story today? Is it another day of drinking and gluttony? Is there anything else to do around here?”

“Sure. Come with me and I’ll show you.”

Rhodes waited while Fisher dried himself off and put his shirt back on. Putting his shirt on did nothing to hide his size, now that Rhodes had actually seen it.

Fisher puttered around his house for a few more minutes and then headed off back along the westbound road. Rhodes didn’t see what either of them could possibly do over there.

The Masks might have programmed Fisher with everything he needed to know about living here. They certainly didn’t do it to Rhodes. He didn’t know the first thing about how to survive in this primitive culture.

At least he and Fisher were heading out of town. Rhodes would be able to talk to Fisher in private and hopefully jog Fisher’s memory about getting the hell out of this trap.

Rhodes scanned the countryside just to make sure they really were alone. The road curved around a stand of trees along the riverbank.

He couldn’t see the town behind him anymore. Nothing but grassy fields surrounded him and Fisher on all sides. Now was the moment.

He took a deep breath to launch into the whole thing when a bell clanged in the distance behind him.

It rang out loud and clear over the landscape and then it just kept on going. It clanged again and again and again without stopping.

Rhodes and Fisher both spun around. “The warning!” Fisher whispered and took off running back the way he came. “Come on! We gotta go!”

“What warning?!” Rhodes rushed after him. “Hey! Where are we going?!”

“Stonebridge is under attack! That’s the warning bell! Come on! We have to arm ourselves.”

“Hey!” Rhodes yelled again, but Fisher didn’t listen.

The two men charged back into town to find the place in chaos. People ran in all directions. Mothers hustled their children indoors. Men charged back and forth for no apparent reason.

Fisher had to slow down to get through the crowd. That gave Rhodes a chance to catch up. “Who’s attacking?” Rhodes panted.

“Let’s find out. Come on.”

Fisher shouldered his way through a bunch of townspeople and finally worked his way to a different barn. Dozens of people, both men and women, already packed around the door trying to force their way inside.

Before Rhodes and Fisher could get to the entrance, the rooves of four nearby houses levered back. Giant cannons rose from inside. Each one sat on a motorized pedestal that locked into place.

The cannons opened fire on some target in the distance out of sight. They belched fusion blasts and seeker missiles into the air. Deep thumps shook the ground underfoot every time one of these massive guns went off.

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Rhodes jumped and spun around to stare at the cannons. Where the hell did they come from?

Ordinary townspeople had been living in those houses until just a few seconds ago. The guns couldn’t fit inside the walls. The guns must have just appeared there when this battle program started.

No one else reacted at all surprised by the guns’ sudden appearance. The townspeople ignored the cannons and went right on with what they were doing.

Most kept trying to get into the barn, but as Rhodes watched more people went into their own houses. They came out carrying fusion rifles—the rifles the Masks used against the Legion.

Armed people streamed past Rhodes heading for the eastbound road. The sound of gunfire and explosions came from that direction in between the deafening boom of the cannons going off.

Fisher grabbed Rhodes’s shirt and yanked him into the barn. Enough people were already inside it.

The two men shouldered their way to one of the stalls and stepped in. Everyone else in the battalion was already there along with a bunch of other townspeople.

Wild, Dash, Koenig, and Zen weren’t there, but no one in the battalion noticed the SAMs’ absence.

Everyone crowded into the stall and gathered to look at a bank of electronic equipment in a style Rhodes didn’t recognize. Large screens all over the wall showed the countryside around Stonebridge.

A line of some unknown attacker advanced from the east. The display also showed red dots where the townspeople were setting up defensive positions to shoot at these enemies to stop them or slow them down.

“Who is it?” Rhodes asked again. “Who’s attacking?”

“It’s the Inviria,” one of the men muttered under his breath and pointed to a spot farther down the road. “We’ll block them in at the corner where the road turns around the river oxbow—here. They won’t be able to get close enough to hit the town the way they did last time.”

“What about Miller’s Peak?” Fisher pointed out a different mountain in the landscape. “It’s farther east. The battalion can get that far sooner than you can. We can use the high ground to stop the Inviria from bringing their artillery within range of Stonebridge.”

The first man nodded. “That sounds good. Do it. Let’s go.”

The battalion left the stall. Half the townsfolk went with them.

Everyone else who entered the barn ran past Rhodes and his people. All the townsfolk carried weapons now. They rushed eastward down the road heading for the battle in the distance.

Rhodes would have liked to ask a million questions, but he didn’t get a chance.

As soon as the battalion walked outside, Oakes, Lauer, Fuentes, and Thackery launched into the air, fired their boosters, and took off heading east, too.

Rhodes stared at the four of them with his jaw on the ground. They had implants. They looked the way they did at Coleridge Station. They had boosters, Viper ports on their backs, and metal limbs.

He didn’t see them change. Their implants just appeared there out of thin air.

The four friends rocketed out of sight in a heartbeat with Coulter, Dietz, and Rhinehart on their heels.

“Let’s go, Captain!” Fisher called. “We have to stop the Inviria from attacking Stonebridge!”

In that moment, Rhodes felt his own implants all over his body. He didn’t feel them reappear. He just became aware that he had them again.

He wasn’t wearing the simple clothes he had on just a few seconds ago. He was a machine from the waist down. His implants covered one arm up to the shoulder, most of his chest, and half of his head.

He glanced down at the scourge guns, lasers, and thermal cannons on his arms.

The instant he made that connection, The Grid activated, covered the landscape and everything in it, and started feeding him information about the surroundings and all the enemy positions.

The Inviria used some kind of mechanized fighting vehicle that advanced along the road from the east.

The Inviria also landed spacecraft on the eastern planes. The craft deployed not just these fighting vehicles but thousands of armed alien ground troops.

Rhodes tried to see what species of alien they were, but at that moment, one of the Stonebridge cannons went off in his ear.

That sound made him react on pure instinct. He launched off the ground to catch up with the rest of the battalion.

As soon as he fired his boosters, Fisher appeared on The Grid in front of his eyes. Fisher wasn’t a man anymore. He was back to being just a curious birdlike face turning right and left in front of Rhodes’s view.

Fisher looked so different like this. He looked much less human and not because he didn’t have a body. Everything about his face looked different—more alien and so much more familiar and trustworthy.

“The Inviria are setting up their artillery on Miller’s Peak,” he reported. “We can still take them out before they bombard Stonebridge.”

The interface switched on. Rhodes became simultaneously aware of everyone in the battalion as well as their SAMs. They were all here, including Wild, Dash, Zen, and Koenig.

None of them looked human anymore, either. They all returned to their original SAMs appearance.

“Some of us should go after the spacecraft and the armored vehicles,” Rocky suggested.

“The cannons can take the armored vehicles and there aren’t enough of us to go after the spacecraft,” Wild pointed out. “We said we’d deal with the artillery, so that’s what we should do.”

Rhinehart turned to Rhodes. “What do you say, Sir? Tell us what you want us to do.”

The whole disconnect between the peaceful life of Stonebridge that Rhodes had been trying so hard to get used to—it clashed so badly with this world of battle and technology.

The contrast brought him back to his senses—and it also brought back everything he’d been thinking about last night.

“None of this is real. We’re in The Grid. We’re prisoners of the Masks. Don’t you remember how they captured us on Rono? Rhinehart—don’t you remember them keeping us in that freezing compartment?”

“We don’t have time to argue about this right now,” Thackery pointed out. “If we don’t take out the artillery, the enemy will bomb Stonebridge and all our families will die.”

“You don’t have families! You don’t have a family anywhere in the world. Lauer—don’t you remember that picture I drew of you and your family riding horses? Fuentes—don’t you remember your family back on the Zoter continent of Preinea? You said you sent them your pay every week. Stonebridge is not our home.”

Lauer glared at him. “You better shut the hell up.”

Rhodes turned to Fisher. “Who are the Inviria? Where do they come from? I’ve never heard of them. Where in the Treaty of Aemon Cluster are we? Which planet are we on? Why aren’t we fighting with the rest of the Legion?”

Fisher opened his mouth to argue, but at that moment, a cannon blast from Stonebridge struck Miller’s Peak in the distance. The Grid showed Rhodes the whole landscape and identified locations, targets, and positions.

“The artillery is almost set up!” Lauer called. “Let’s go! We can work this out later!”

End of Chapter 11.