A deafening explosion jolted Rhodes out of a sound sleep. His head shot up. He wasn’t in that freezing cold compartment anymore. He didn’t even feel cold.
He sat on the ground leaning against the wall, but it was nighttime. Sweltering heat pulsed through the air. Rhodes instantly started to sweat. He barely remembered how cold he’d just been in that compartment.
The instant he opened his eyes, Fisher flashed onto The Grid in front of him. “We’re under attack, Captain! We have to evacuate the platoons and the battalion before the Emal overrun this mountaintop.”
“Emal….” Rhodes scrambled to orient himself. “Where are we?”
“We’re on Nos in the Rulolla system. Look out!” Fisher rushed Rhodes and extended his grid lines to grab Rhodes, but not fast enough.
A laser cannon blasted into the ground twenty feet away. The concussion hurled Legion soldiers in all directions.
Rhodes scrambled to get out of the way and bumped into Coulter and Dietz sitting right next to him.
At the same instant, Oakes charged over with Captain Vernick from the 249th Platoon. Oakes got in Rhodes’s face and yelled over the noise of more explosions going off.
“The Ravagers are coming in now, Captain! If we want to evacuate with the platoons, we have to go now!”
Rhodes opened his mouth to answer, but a piercing scream cut him off. Gunfire erupted across the landscape.
He spun around and spotted a line of soldiers pinned down on the farthest hilltop. They fired their Jackhammers down the mountainside at something out of sight.
Emal lasers spouted from the other side. Giant laser cannon shots blasted from farther out on the dark continent.
Three of those shots smashed into the Ravagers coming down to lift off the platoons. All three Ravagers detonated a few hundred yards overhead.
Soldiers fled the burning fuel and torched hull sections plummeting out of the atmosphere. Debris and wreckage flattened soldiers right and left.
“Another five Ravagers are descending now!” Fisher called over the noise. “We have to defend them so they can evacuate the platoons!” He turned to the other SAMs. “Let’s go! The Emal only have five base ships out there. We can take them out and then work our way forward through the hordes on the ground.”
Oakes, Lauer, and Thackery all took off. They fired their boosters without waiting for Rhodes to give his permission.
Before he could even open his mouth, the whole battalion launched and raced away through the night heading toward the base ships in the distance.
Rhodes took a split second to catch up. “Hey—hold it!” he yelled. “This is all wrong!”
“We can’t leave the platoons undefended!” Rhinehart called back. “The Emal will wipe them all out!”
“Think about what you’re doing!” Rhodes countered. “The Emal were never in the Rulolla system! Think about it! The Rulolla system is on the opposite side of the Treaty of Aemon Cluster from the Emal wars. None of this makes sense!”
“That does!” Oakes dodged sideways to avoid getting annihilated by another laser blast from the base ships.
“We got captured by the Masks! Don’t you remember?” Rhodes turned from Oakes to Rhinehart and finally to Lauer. “We’re in The Grid! This isn’t real. They’re testing us.”
“We have an objective to accomplish, Captain,” Fisher told him. “Thousands of platoon lives depend on those Ravagers making landfall.”
Rhodes turned to Fisher next. “Search the Legion database. Search every battle between the Legion and the Emal. The Emal never even wanted the Rulolla system. It wasn’t part of the territory they originally wanted to reclaim. The Legion never fought the Emal in that system. This is all fake. The Masks created this Grid landscape to test us in battle.”
Fisher hesitated and then checked The Grid. He swiveled it in front of Rhodes’s eyes.
Rhodes kept flying along with his subordinates. He needed to convince them that this wasn’t real.
Then what? Then he, Thackery, Coulter, and Rhinehart would wind up back in their freezing-cold compartment.
He would almost rather fight the Emal than go back there, but he had to take this chance to convince everyone.
“We have to escape from the Masks. We can only do that by helping each other.” He turned to Oakes and Lauer. “Were you in the town in the grasslands before this? Is that where the Masks are keeping you?”
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Lauer glanced over, opened his mouth to answer, and his expression started to clear. Did he understand now?
At that moment, a colossal shot from a different base ship sizzled across the landscape and clipped Lauer across the side of the head.
The shot would have killed him if it had been aiming only a few inches to the right. It zinged across the side of his cranial implant, tumbled him head over heel, and he started to plummet toward the ground.
Rhodes veered hard to his right, dove, and his grid lines took over on the wing. He changed himself into a Striker, zoomed under Lauer, and caught his unconscious body in the cockpit.
Rhodes soared back up to rejoin his comrades. He accessed The Grid to check Lauer’s vital signs. Everything was reading normal including his brain wave patterns.
Rhodes rejoined the battalion to find them engaged in a brutal firefight against some other kind of fighter craft he didn’t recognize.
These craft whizzed around and around the battalion hammering everyone with some kind of ordnance weapon. It was nothing Rhodes had ever seen in battle before.
He tried to fly into the mayhem to get near his friends. One of the enemy gunshots hit Rhodes’s wing and knocked him off course.
He somersaulted to the edge of the battle. He was closest to Dietz and Fuentes here. “Dietz!” Rhodes hollered. “This isn’t real! We have to resist this and escape from the Masks!”
Dietz started to answer, had to roll out of the way, and righted himself thirty feet away. “It sure looks real to me, Sir!”
“These fighter craft don’t even belong to the Emal!” Rhodes plunged back into the battle trying to get closer to Oakes and Rhinehart. Maybe they would listen to him.
He made it halfway to Rhinehart before Thackery came streaking out of nowhere.
She collided with Rhodes in a devastating smash that carried both of them out of the way of an enemy fighter about to steamroll both of them.
More gunshots whistled around Rhodes’s ears. He had to keep moving. He fired his engines and circled the battle only to find Thackery still at his side.
“You’re right, Captain!” she exclaimed. “We gotta get out of here! This is too dangerous!”
“We have to convince the others.”
“How?” she asked. “They all seem to think this is real.”
Rhodes took that moment to look at Fisher. “You were right, Captain. The Emal never invaded the Rulolla system. These fighters are registered to the Turnion system—which is a Treaty of Aemon Cluster member thousands of lightyears across the Cluster from both the Rulolla system and the Emal wars. These fighters should be friendly. This must be a Grid creation from the Masks.”
“Can you get through to the other SAMs?” Rhodes asked. “Can you show them the evidence to make them snap everyone else out of it?”
“I believe you, Captain,” Koenig told him. “You don’t have to convince me—or I should rather say that you already did.”
Rhodes surveyed the battle. “Rocky and Rhinehart—we have to convince them next—them and Oakes and Dash. Once we swing them, we can convince everyone else.” He turned to Thackery. “You take Lauer.”
She frowned at him. “Why? He’s perfectly safe with you.”
“Just take him. Get him out of danger whatever you do. Make sure he gets out of here.”
He scrambled to transfer Lauer to Thackery. She changed into a Striker and he created a long jointed arm to lift Lauer as gently as possible into her cockpit.
Lauer started to stir, but Rhodes couldn’t wait any longer. He sprinted away to where Oakes, Coulter, and Rhinehart were busy trading gunfire with the fighter craft.
The fighters kept pelting around and around the battalion in circles. The three men occupied the center firing outward.
Dietz and Fuentes got isolated to one side facing off against another ten of these fighters.
The fighters pounded the two men to drive them farther away from their comrades.
Lasers from the Emal horde on the ground kept zinging upward to aim at the battalion, but the aliens never hit anybody. They were too far away.
The base ships posed a much greater threat. They kept firing at the Ravagers trying to land on the mountaintop.
The battalion couldn’t get anywhere near the base ships to give the Ravagers cover. The fighters created a blockade to stop the battalion from going any deeper into the continent.
Rhodes scattered gunfire at the fighter craft, but he didn’t try too hard to hit them. They weren’t real.
“Forget those jokers!” he yelled to Oakes and Rhinehart. “This is all some kind of training exercise inside The Grid. This isn’t real! The Masks invented this. Don’t you remember, Rhinehart? Do you remember that frozen meat locker where they’ve been keeping us these last few days? We were there…..and now we’re here.”
Rhinehart gritted his teeth and concentrated on bombarding the fighter craft with his scourge guns. “If it’s real or not, Lauer is just as hurt. Those platoons will be just as dead if we don’t stop the base ships.”
“Hey—listen to me!” Rhodes grabbed Rhinehart by the shoulders and forced him to turn around. “This isn’t real! The Emal never invaded the Rulolla system! The Masks concocted this out of our memories. We have to resist. We have to find a way to escape from them. Hey! I’m talking to you, Lieutenant!”
Rhinehart scowled at Rhodes and then the first hint of doubt started to creep across Rhinehart’s face.
He started to take a breath, but right then, one of the base ships hit a fighter craft that had been fighting the battalion until right that minute.
The craft corkscrewed around the battalion and turned inward to aim its guns at Coulter. The base ship smashed the ship in the tail, detonated it, and the burning wreck hurtled straight for Coulter.
Rhinehart, Rhodes, and Oakes all dove for Coulter at the same time. They pounced on him to tackle him out of the way, only for the ship to collide with all four of them.
The impact flung them clear. They sailed sideways and came to a standstill fifty feet from the battle.
The fighter craft broke away heading for the mountaintop. The leaders got there first and started hammering the Legion position with vicious fire. The Ravagers had to retreat even farther into the atmosphere.
Oakes straightened up and turned his boosters toward the mountain. “Come on! We have to help them!”
Rhodes grabbed him to hold him back. “Stop! We can’t risk fighting these things anymore. We need to figure out a way to break away from the Masks.”
Oakes frowned at him and then squinted across the landscape. “Are you sure about this? A whole lot of good men will die if you’re wrong.”
“I can prove it to you. Watch this.”
Rhodes started to turn away. He planned to show the rest of the battalion Fisher’s evidence about both the Emal and Turnion the fighter craft.
He barely got out of the group when another massive laser shot from one of the base ships torched across the landscape.
It aimed for the Ravagers, but Thackery got in the way. She didn’t see it in time.
Rhodes reacted on pure adrenaline and dove into the laser’s path before it could hit her. The shot smashed him in the back.
He heard Oakes and Rhinehart both roaring at him. “CAPTAIN—NO!!” but it was too late.
He felt himself falling……
End of Chapter 6.