Rhodes dropped into The Grid and looked around at his subordinates. They all looked as gloomy and drained as they did when they first got out of stasis—this time.

Going through a conversion cycle—or even multiple conversion cycles—didn’t do anything to perk them up.

The lingering reality weighed on each of them more heavily with every passing day. It almost got worse with every passing hour they had to stay alive.

The interface stayed active when they entered The Grid. The eight SAMs joined the circle in front of each member of the battalion.

“Is everybody ready?” Rhodes asked.

“Ready,” Henshaw replied.

“Shut it down at the first sign of trouble,” Rhodes ordered. “If anyone malfunctions, get out of The Grid, shut down your weapons, and get out of danger pronto. Understood?”

Everyone nodded. Lauer said, “Yes, Sir.”

“Let’s go,” Rhodes ordered.

He turned away, fired his boosters, and took off through the black Grid landscape. The rest of the battalion flew on his heels.

The landscape changed immediately. Rhodes cringed when it morphed into another Emal deathscape just like Luluna.

Some part of him expected this. The system—or whatever cosmic power decided which scenarios the battalion trained in—they must have realized the Emal presented the battalion’s greatest emotional challenge.

The battalion soared over mountains of rubble, twisted bodies, and crashed ships. The grid lines rotated behind Rhodes and adjusted his view of the landscape, every obstacle, and every enemy position ahead.

The battalion approached the front line. “What’s the objective?” Rhodes asked Fisher.

“We’re supposed to defend another platoon evacuation. Ravagers are coming in to lift off the platoons, but the Emal are pressing too closely for the Ravagers to land.”

Rhodes glanced up at the sky. “I don’t see any Ravagers. Why do they take so long to descend?”

“They don’t want to fly into enemy laser fire.”

“So we have to fly into enemy laser fire instead?” Lauer asked. “Stellar.”

“This scenario has all the elements that caused us to malfunction before,” Rocky pointed out.

“All except real Emal,” Oakes added. “We never dealt with a training session where the Emal found out about us and tried to capture us for our implants.”

“They could be trying to do it here,” Rhinehart suggested, but right then, the laser fire in the distance flickered in the battalion’s direction.

“Get down on the ground!” Rhodes ordered. “Get behind the hills!”

Fisher adjusted The Grid in front of Rhodes’s eyes. “We’re still too far away from the platoons. We won’t be able to defend them from here.”

“There’s another channel behind those hills there,” Koenig suggested. “We can fly through the channel, flank the Emal, and attack them from the northeast. That will draw them away from the platoons long enough for the Ravagers to land.”

“Don’t listen to him, Captain,” Thackery interjected. “That channel is a trap.”

Rhodes spun around to stare at her. “What makes you say that—and don’t tell me it’s because Koenig suggested it.”

“It isn’t that. Look. The Emal have mounted laser cannons on both sides of the channel.”

“They’re unmanned,” Koenig argued.

“Shut the hell up! I’m not talking to you,” Thackery snapped and made some modifications to The Grid layout. The whole battalion looked at it through the interface. “If you roll back the readings from previous battles, you’ll see that the Emal planted these cannons in that channel before the battle shifted over here. The cannon placements are mechanized. We would fly straight into them.”

“How did you figure that out without Koenig telling you?” Rhinehart asked.

She sneered at him and then wrinkled her nose at her SAM. “I don’t need him to tell me that shit.”

“We could still use the channel,” Koenig suggested. “We can just fly over the cannon placements and avoid them.”

“You really must be malfunctioning if you expect me to fall for that. The cannons can swivel upward and hit us from any direction.” She turned back to Rhodes. “We can’t use that channel.”

“What about using a different channel?” Fisher asked. “We can use this one farther west. It doesn’t have cannon placements and it would accomplish the same thing. It would get us into a protected position where we can flank the Emal.”

Thackery made a face at him, too, but she didn’t argue back.

Rhodes didn’t understand her sudden hostility toward the SAMs, especially her own. He couldn’t find any fault with her logic about the cannon placements, though. They really did make that channel a death trap.

“Find us a route through the alternate channel, Fisher,” Rhodes ordered. “Lay out a course for us and transmit it to each person’s Grid.”

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“Sending it now,” Fisher replied.

The route showed up on The Grid. Thackery didn’t complain about it.

Rhodes gave the order and the battalion diverted into the other channel. He kept pivoting The Grid in front of his face, changing the lines, and checking every possible angle for hidden enemies.

The Emal concentrated their firepower on the platoons in front of them. As usual, the Emal pinned the platoons down in the black wasteland.

Lasers, fusion blasts, and the fire from exploding ships gave the only light. Rhodes and his subordinates could see everything in The Grid, but Rhodes found himself hesitating to trust that.

What if Fisher was right? What if Rhodes was making a colossal mistake by trusting both Fisher and The Grid?

Rhodes tried to shake those thoughts out of his head. He couldn’t start questioning them now—especially not Fisher.

Fisher and The Grid were the only tools Rhodes had to work with. If he got rid of them, he had nothing left.

The battalion got halfway up the channel before lasers erupted from all the way down on the very floor. They blasted scrap metal out of the way before the lasers burned upward into the night.

The rubble must have buried the cannon placements. The debris concealed the guns until the battalion flew directly over them.

Four lasers fired at the battalion and two of them hit Thackery. She tumbled out of the sky and pitched at terminal velocity toward the ground.

Coulter yanked out of formation immediately and dove after her. “Don’t go down there, Eddie!” Murphy yelled, but Coulter was already plummeting straight for Thackery.

He wound up flying straight into another laser barrage. They converged and smashed into him, too, just as he caught Thackery out of the air.

He broke her fall, but at too great a cost. He fell through another volley of shots that pinwheeled him and Thackery head over heel.

They crashed down on the ground at the very bottom of the channel. They landed close enough to the cannon placements themselves that the lasers couldn’t hit either of them here. That was the only thing that saved them.

“Murphy! Koenig!” Rhodes snapped. “Are you both still online?!”

“We’re fine,” Murphy growled. “Coulter is injured and Thackery is unconscious.”

“Stay where you are,” Rhodes replied. “We’ll accomplish the objective and end the training session. That’s the quickest way to get you out of The Grid. We can’t risk coming down to get you right now.”

“Go,” Murphy muttered. “These two aren’t going anywhere.”

Rhodes checked The Grid once to make sure Thackery and Coulter were all right. Coulter had laser burns on his abdomen and the organic side of his shoulder. Other than that, he was fine.

Thackery’s vital signs read normal. She was just unconscious. Both SAMs were fully operational, though, so her injuries couldn’t have been very severe.

Rhodes dragged his awareness back to the battle. He could think of plenty of things he wanted to say to both Thackery and Coulter when this was all over.

That would have to wait, though.

“Scan the rest of the channel and see if you can locate any other placements,” he told Fisher.

“There are four of them. I’m bringing them up on The Grid. You can avoid them by flying higher up the hillsides on both sides. That should avoid the motion sensors.”

Rhodes obeyed without a word. He didn’t allow himself to think of Fisher as his superior officer.

It would have been more accurate to say that Rhodes no longer cared if Fisher was his superior officer.

At least someone around here might actually be qualified to make decisions for the \ battalion. Rhodes sure wasn’t—or he didn’t feel like he was.

Listening to someone else and following Fisher’s orders gave Rhodes one of the greatest senses of relief he’d ever experienced in his life. He trusted Fisher a hell of a lot more than he trusted any other senior officer involved in this war.

He swooped high over the hillsides, but never high enough to alert the Emal of the battalion’s approach. He swerved wide to avoid the last placement.

The Grid showed the Emal line ahead. They bore down even harder on the Legion platoons. The Ravagers hung off in orbit. Lasers flew thick and fast. The Ravagers couldn’t descend without getting destroyed.

Rhodes gunned his boosters. “Get the Ravagers down here now!” he ordered. “Spread out and draw the Emal away from the platoons!”

His subordinates scattered to the four winds. It would have been really helpful to have eight people attacking the Emal right now instead of six.

He stuffed down his annoyance and concentrated everything on getting the Emal’s attention.

He didn’t use his Grid this time or change into a giant glowing alien. No one in the battalion did.

They plunged in gunning all their weapons at the Emal on the western flank. Rhodes flew straight ahead while his subordinates fanned down the line to cover as much territory as possible.

Rhodes unloaded with his scourge guns. The gun blasts lit up the night. They got the Emal’s attention better than anything—except maybe Viper explosions.

He unloaded one Viper after another. They detonated down the line and the Emal spun around to face the battalion.

The Grid gave Rhodes a perfect view of the Ravagers sinking through the dense cloud. The Emal opened fire. That left a clear space for the Ravagers to land and start taking the platoons on board.

Eight members of the battalion might not have been able to stand up to the Emal numbers. Six definitely couldn’t.

The Emal overran the battalion in seconds. Whoever programmed this training session definitely didn’t include the part about the Emal trying to capture the battalion for their implants.

Rhodes’s mind shifted gears. He came up with an imaginary explanation that the Emal no longer wanted to capture the battalion. The aliens just wanted to destroy the only Legion weapon that posed a threat to the Emal invasion.

None of that mattered because the battalion couldn’t hold its own against the Emal horde. Thousands of aliens surged away from the escaping platoons and smothered the battalion in no time.

Lasers wheeled back and forth across the battlefield, but they didn’t concentrate on the platoons anymore.

Base ships in the far rear on the Emal side turned their guns on the battalion. Every shot killed countless Emal, but the aliens didn’t care.

A punishing smash hit Rhinehart thirty yards away from Rhodes. Rhinehart screamed and crumpled under a tide of alien bodies.

“Rhinehart!” Rhodes bellowed, but Rhinehart vanished off the interface along with Rocky.

Rhodes spun around to fight his way over there, but he couldn’t move with so many Emal in the way.

He scrambled to locate Rhinehart on The Grid, but Rhinehart wasn’t there anymore.

“He’s gone, Captain!” Fisher yelled over the noise. “The Grid must have returned him to Coleridge Station!”

“We gotta get out of here! How much longer before the Ravagers lift off?”

Fisher said something in response, but Rhodes didn’t catch it as another bone-crushing smash of cannon fire struck on his right.

Lauer went down and he vanished off the map, too. Wild went with him. That left four people—Rhodes, Henshaw, Dietz, and Oakes.

The Emal swarm overwhelmed the four even easily, now that the aliens no longer had so many people to target.

Rhodes went into a frenzy shooting as many Emal as he could. He got so preoccupied with shooting every weapon in his arsenal that he forgot to check on the rest of his people.

He swiped his own lasers back and forth across the horde. He unleashed one Viper after another.

So many Emal packed around him that the Vipers exploded right on top of him. Their blasts pounded his implants and nearly knocked him down.

He couldn’t let himself fall under these aliens. They would cut him to pieces.

He spun his laser to the right carving a path through hundreds of bodies. Countless more Emal surged at him from right behind the aliens he just cut down.

Their eyes surrounded him on all sides. He couldn’t see anything beyond all those eyes staring back at him.

Without warning, a catastrophic smash hit him from somewhere. It flattened him in a split second….and he came to his senses back on the plain, black Grid. The war-torn landscape was gone.

End of Chapter 15.