Fisher turned off halfway through town, pushed open the door to a random house, and led Rhodes inside.

A dozen tables packed the main room with people sitting at the benches. They ate and drank, talked and laughed and joked, and a few other people hustled through the building serving everyone.

Fisher walked into the wall of noise. No one noticed his and Rhodes’s entrance.

Fisher approached one of the tables and threw himself down on the end of a bench. “Take a seat, Captain.”

The man across from him spun around, looked up, and his flinty dark eyes widened when he saw Rhodes. “Captain—you’re back!”

Rhodes took a split second before he recognized Lauer. Lauer didn’t look the same without his implants.

He looked even rougher, bigger in the back and shoulders, and scruffier in his hair and beard.

Black dirt crusted his fingernails, the creases of his palms, and even the lines of his face. He looked like he’d been living here all his life. Rhodes found it impossible to believe that Lauer had ever lived anywhere else.

A tall, lean, brown-haired woman waved across the table. “Move down, everyone. Make room for the captain to sit down.”

Lauer shoved against the man next to him. That movement drew Rhodes’s attention to the people nearest him.

He probably wouldn’t have recognized any of them if he hadn’t spotted Dane Rhinehart sitting three places down the table.

Rhinehart stuck out a mile with his white-blonde hair, crystal blue eyes, and hulking body. He sat with his left side facing Rhodes—the organic side.

Just for a second, Rhodes could trick himself into thinking that Rhinehart still had implants on the other side of his head. That’s why Rhodes couldn’t see the implants, but they were still there. That was the only way he recognized Rhinehart.

Then Rhinehart turned his head and shattered the illusion. He didn’t have implants. His baby-faced good looks made him look even younger than he was. He could have been any oversized country boy sitting at a table eating his lunch.

The next minute, the man next to Lauer spoke up. “Did they scramble your brain in the hospital—the way they scrambled all of ours?”

Rhodes didn’t see the person who spoke, but he definitely recognized the voice. It was Eddie Coulter.

Rhodes turned in his direction and went through another wave of confusion when he saw Coulter. Coulter didn’t have implants, either. None of them did.

The whole battalion sat at the same table. Lauer, Coulter, Rhinehart, and Dietz sat on this side. Ted Oakes sat next to Fisher on the other side.

Two women sat between Oakes and Fuentes. One of the women was the tall, dark-haired woman who told Lauer and the others to move down. The other was older with greying blonde hair and a very soft, kindly face lined with wrinkles.

She smiled broadly at Rhodes. “Aren’t you going to sit down, Captain?” she asked.

She spoke in a deep, husky voice—a voice Rhodes recognized instantly. He never would have recognized this woman any other way. It was Van, Fuentes’s SAM.

The much younger woman sitting next to her was Alyssa Thackery. She didn’t look like a soldier at all. Her long brown hair hung loose and soft over her shoulders. She actually shone with inner beauty unlike anything Rhodes ever thought possible.

She smiled broadly and easily, too. Damn, she looked happy! They all did.

Rhodes’s eye skipped down the table. They were all here, including the SAMs. A burly man with a thick round halo of messy brown curls sat next to Rhinehart.

The guy had a shaggy, dog-like appearance that instantly made Rhodes think of Murphy, Coulter’s SAM.

The man sitting next to Van was a tall, muscular guy with a long, narrow, horse-like face. He would have been about twenty-eight if he’d been human, but he wasn’t human. It was Rocky.

Thackery snickered. “Don’t act so surprised,” she told Rhodes. “Fisher is a person here. All the other SAMs are, too.”

“Where is everyone else?” Rhodes glanced around the house and realized he was still standing here like a dope.

Wild, Zen, Koenig, and Dash weren’t here. Rhodes studied the people at nearby tables, but he didn’t see anyone he recognized.

He wouldn’t have recognized the three SAMs even if he’d been looking straight at them. Wild was a robot in The Grid. Zen was an orb of lighting. Koenig was a scramble of grid lines with no particular shape.

Dash was the only one who even remotely resembled a person, but he never developed any color or substance. He was just a grid outline of green lines and black squares.

Just then, an aging, heavy-set man in a smudged apron came over to their table. He carried a tray packed with glasses all foaming with thick beer.

He sidestepped Rhodes, set the tray on the table, and started handing out the glasses to everyone present, including the SAMs.

“Can I get you something to eat, Captain?” the man asked.

Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

Rhodes assumed right up until that moment that this must be the landlord of whatever eating establishment they were in.

As soon as the man spoke, Rhodes recognized his voice, too. It was Koenig, Thackery’s SAM.

“What in the hell are you doing, Koenig?” Rhodes gasped. “Are you….working here?”

“I gotta keep myself occupied somehow and people gotta eat.” Koenig picked up the last glass and held it out. “Sit down and have a drink. Make yourself at home.”

“Bring him one of those lunch platters,” Rocky chimed in. “The captain looks hungry.”

“Of course he’s hungry,” Coulter replied. “He’s been in the hospital for weeks.”

“Weeks!” Rhodes exclaimed. “I have?”

Coulter shrugged. “Well, it sure feels like it. This place hasn’t been the same without you.”

Rhodes sank onto the bench in stunned disbelief. This was all getting to be too much for him.

His arm raised his glass to his mouth without him thinking about it. As soon as he tasted the beer, he knew he really did need a drink.

He took a deep gulp and did his best not to notice everyone at the table watching him.

He wound up sitting down across from Fisher. Fisher’s eyes followed Rhodes’s every move.

He should be grateful that his friends were keeping an eye on him and helping him settle in here. He was grateful for that. He just didn’t know how to adjust to this.

“Wild is over there.” Thackery jerked her thumb over her shoulder. “He’s as antisocial here as he was in The Grid.”

Rhodes followed the direction of her gesture. An old man with long, stringy white hair sat in another rocking chair by the fireplace. He sat with his back to the room, smoked a pipe, and stared into the flames.

He looked powerfully built from the back, and while Rhodes watched, Wild bent over and tapped his pipe out on the hearthstone at his feet.

Rhodes caught a glimpse of the old man’s profile. A thick, white beard covered the lower half of his face. He wore his hair loose. It hung around his face when he bent over.

His features had a hard, harsh, stern cast. He looked like the kind of old man who would sit alone with his back to the room in a house packed with his neighbors and acquaintances.

“Leave him alone,” Lauer interjected. “You can’t blame him if he doesn’t want to talk. He doesn’t know these people from a hole in the ground.”

“He knows us,” Van pointed out.

“That doesn’t mean he wants to crowd over here listening to us shoot the breeze,” Lauer replied. “If he wants to keep to himself, I don’t have a problem with that.”

“Where’s Dash?” Rhodes asked.

“Over there.” Oakes pointed in a different direction.

Rhodes had a hard time seeing the burly, dark-haired man sitting across the room. He sat on a stool by a set of stairs rising to the building’s second story.

This man had shoulder-length black hair, a tight, pointed black beard, and he didn’t wear the plain cotton clothes everyone else in town wore.

This man wore leather pants and a leather shirt with a thick leather belt buckled around his waist. An enormous, heavy iron buckle occupied the central place right over the man’s washboard stomach.

He carried a long, curved hunting knife in his belt and another one stuck into his calf-high leather boots. A leather shoulder bag sat crumpled on the floor by his heel.

The reason Rhodes had trouble seeing the guy was because he had two girls perched on his knees, one on each knee.

They wore billowing white dresses that looked totally out of place in this town. They also wore their hair in elaborate curls piled on top of their heads with extra curlicues draped down to their bare cleavage.

Their tightly laced dresses pushed up their chests and ended dangerously low without actually exposing anything.

The two girls looked so garishly provocative compared to every other woman Rhodes had seen in this town. The girls couldn’t be anything but prostitutes.

They fawned all over Dash. It had to be him. He was the only man over there that Oakes could have been pointing at.

Dash kept darting from one girl to the next, kissing them in deep, passionate, open-mouthed kisses, and burrowing into their necks.

He made them gasp, swoon, and moan when he whispered in their ears and bit down their cleavage getting closer to their bodices.

“Is he always like this?” Rhodes asked as delicately as he could.

Oakes snorted. “Every chance he gets. Don’t even ask me where he gets the money to pay for it.”

“So how does he pay for it?” Rhodes asked.

“Koenig says Dash hunts in the forests and brings in fresh game for the kitchens,” Thackery replied.

“I heard he traffics in stolen goods,” Fisher added. “I heard he isn’t even above robbing houses outside the area to pay for all his extracurricular activities.”

“He certainly needs money to pay for them all,” Lauer muttered.

Rhodes made a strategic decision to tear his gaze away from what Dash was doing. He’d been locked up in The Grid all his life as a holographic representation of a computer program. No wonder he wanted to cut loose and have some fun now while he had the chance.

Rhodes took another deep pull from his beer glass. It tasted incredible. He hadn’t eaten or drunk anything since he woke up from stasis. The sensation blew his mind.

A second later, Koenig came back with a dozen platters of all kinds of food, placed them in front of the whole battalion, and went back to his work like this was the most normal thing in the world.

Piles of sliced, steaming, juicy roast beef, cut-up pieces of fruit, molten glistening mounds of sliced potatoes swimming in cheese sauce, a towering pyramid of meatballs dripping with savory glaze, and a giant collection of sliced bread and a crock of homemade butter spilled off the platter in front of Rhodes.

The platter next to it carried an equally impressive array of desserts, some of which Rhodes didn’t recognize.

His mouth started to water at the sight of the food. He almost didn’t dare to touch any of it in case it vanished before he got a chance to eat it.

Lauer picked up a fork, skewered one of the meatballs, and stuffed it whole into his mouth.

At that signal, everyone at the table started eating, passing the trays back and forth, asking each other for things, and talking about a bunch of people and events in town.

Rhodes picked up his fork trying to decide what to eat first. His heart pounded and he started to get a little emotional at the thought of eating this food.

He didn’t notice how much he missed eating—not as long as he stayed at Coleridge Station where no one in the battalion ate. It wasn’t part of their life anymore.

Everything on that tray looked too good to touch. He just wanted to sit here and bask in the heavenly reality that he could eat it if he really wanted to.

No one else showed any sign of holding back. They all dug into the food. Even the SAMs helped themselves with as much enthusiasm as the rest of the battalion.

The piles of food started to shrink in front of Rhodes’s eyes. If he didn’t eat now, he’d miss his chance. There would be nothing left for him.

He started with a piece of roast beef and nearly had a heart attack when the juice gushed onto his tongue.

He chewed slowly, but the sight of everyone else stuffing their faces made him eat faster. He had to eat this food now in case he didn’t get another chance.

Rhodes pretended not to see Fisher grinning at him across the table. Rhodes was just starting on his second helping of potatoes when Koenig brought him another beer.

“So where’s Zen?” Rhodes finally asked.

“He just walked in.” Thackery nodded at another group of young men heading for a table by the fireplace. “He’s the one with the red hair.”

The young men sat down together and started talking with their heads together. They didn’t look much different from everyone else in town.

Zen’s blazing red hair and freckles made him stand out from the others. Other than that, Rhodes didn’t see anything remarkable about him or his behavior.

“He has his own friends,” Oakes explained. “He’s too cool to be seen with us.”

Some of the others laughed. Rhodes supposed he had nothing to complain about the SAMs living separate lives. He shouldn’t have expected anything else.

End of Chapter 9.