Rhodes stepped out of his standing conversion station. The Masks didn’t use lying down conversion capsules unless someone got injured or suffered a dangerous malfunction.

  Dietz, Rhinehart, Coulter, and Lauer were already up and moving around. Oakes, Fuentes, and Thackery were still in their conversion cycles.

  Rhodes instantly registered a new series of orders for the battalion’s next assault. The planet where they’d recently engaged with the Aemon Legion had been the planet Keonus.

  The Legion had withdrawn from that planet leaving the Masks to stake another clear victory over the battle.

  Now the two armies were preparing to re-engage on the next planet over—the planet Lotho.

  Rhodes didn’t think anything about that, but when he made eye contact with Dietz, everything came back.

  Dietz stared directly into Rhodes’s eyes without looking away. Rhodes couldn’t remember Dietz ever looking at Rhodes as directly as that.

  Dietz’s expression made Rhodes tremble. Something happened to Dietz. Rhodes couldn’t pinpoint exactly when it happened or even what it was.

  This was a completely different Dietz—or maybe Rhodes was the one who changed. His perception of Dietz had changed so radically that Rhodes no longer recognized the man in front of him.

  Dietz always lurked around the battalion’s periphery. He let Rhinehart, Oakes, Lauer, and the others take the lead.

  Dietz did what Rhodes told him to do, but that was all.

  Dietz never gave anyone any reason to believe he really wanted to be a part of this. He would just as soon go his own way. He wasn’t even really a part of this battalion.

  He came right over to Rhodes this morning—another first. “It looks like we’re going out again, Captain.”

  “Yes, it does.” Rhodes found himself studying Dietz just as closely.

  Dietz stayed near Rhodes and didn’t go off to the computer terminal or occupy himself with anything else.

  His dark, bright eyes kept searching Rhodes for answers. Was Dietz wondering if Rhodes would order the battalion to turn to the Legion side?

  If Rhodes remembered all that, why not Dietz, too?

  Rhodes didn’t dare to believe it of the others, but Dietz’s expression and that haunted light in Dietz’s eyes definitely gave Rhodes hope.

  He didn’t voice his concerns to the rest of the battalion. He didn’t want to risk Fuentes attacking him a third time.

  Fuentes glared at both Dietz and Rhodes. If Fuentes remembered, he remembered why he attacked Rhodes, tried to kill him, and then took two Viper blasts right in the chest from Dietz.

  Dietz glared right back at Fuentes. The old Jairo Dietz would have played it off and pretended like it never happened. Not anymore.

  Dietz kept moving around the room to position himself between Rhodes and Fuentes. Dietz kept a constant watch on Fuentes. Dietz held himself stiff and watchful in case Fuentes tried anything else.

  Rhodes interfaced with the rest of the battalion and brought up The Grid of the landscape where they would meet the Legion again today.

  He revolved The Grid in front of them so they could all see it. It might not mean anything to them, but it sure did to him.

  Legion platoons had surrounded and were trying to defend a city packed the walls with civilians—human civilians.

  The Masks ringed the city outside the Legion position. If the Legion fell, the whole city would go down.

  Rhodes spotted Dietz glancing at him out of the corner of his eye, but Rhodes didn’t acknowledge that glance.

  “Our orders are to assault the Legion position—here.” Rhodes indicated a spot on the city’s western side. “The buildings offer cover here for the Legion to target the Masks ground troops from windows and upper stories. Our orders are to take out those buildings. The rest of the city is too well defended. As soon as we bring down those buildings, the Masks ground troops will be able to get inside the city. The Legion won’t be able to defend it from the inside. The platoons won’t be able to stand up to the Masks on the ground. The Legion’s advantage will be broken.”

  No one answered. No one gave any sign that those words meant a thing to them.

  Rhodes interfaced with each person and every SAM. They all kept their expressions neutral—all except Fuentes. He kept glaring at Rhodes, but that was nothing new.

  Rhodes adjusted The Grid in a few different directions. The ship on which the Masks kept him and the battalion took a position ten miles outside the city.

  The battalion could use boosters to fly to the city in a few minutes. Nothing would stop them from assaulting those buildings.

  Rhodes tried to come up with a plan to wake up his subordinates—again. How many more times would he have to go through this process before he finally got through to them?

  The Masks would just keep wiping the battalion’s memories—forever. Why did Rhodes even bother to fight these machines? He couldn’t win.

  It would be so easy to just give in to the manipulation, the drugs, and the hallucination of everything being okay.

  Even now, right at this moment, the Masks kept the battalion in a Grid simulation of the barracks at Fort Bastion—which were in turn a copy of the barracks at Coleridge Station.

  Rhodes knew now that none of this was real. That computer terminal over there wasn’t real.

  The battalion went through the motions of eating breakfast and putting their dirty dishes away. The food tasted heavenly, but none of that was real, either.

  The battles sure were, though. The Legion soldiers the battalion would kill today would be real. The ships they blew up would be real. The families left behind would be real.

  Rhodes went through his day as normal. He didn’t give any outward sign that he saw through the illusion.

  His senses picked up every detail with excruciating precision. When would be the moment when he lost awareness that this even was an illusion? It could come anytime.

  Then he’d be right back where he started.

  The intervals between losing his memory and regaining his awareness of his predicament—those intervals seemed to be getting shorter.

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  He lost awareness on the battlefield when the Masks ship picked him up. He regained his memory almost instantly when he woke up this morning.

  Dietz did that for him. Dietz’s heroic rescue yesterday brought Rhodes back to his senses.

  Dietz kept giving Rhodes sidelong looks all morning. Maybe Dietz never lost his memory. Maybe he’d been aware from the beginning that this was all one big drug-induced fantasy world.

  Dietz acted so normal in Stonebridge. He had a wife and children there, too, but maybe he never bought into the trick. Maybe he knew all along. Maybe he’d been waiting all this time for Rhodes to come to his senses.

  Would Rhodes have threatened or attacked Dietz for trying to tear him away from that world? Would Rhodes have called Dietz a liar to his face?

  Rhodes couldn’t guarantee that he wouldn’t have. He kicked himself now for ever thinking anything bad about Dietz.

  How did it happen that Dietz turned out to be more loyal to the Legion than Rhodes himself?

  Rhodes couldn’t make up for it now. He could only make up for it by getting the battalion out of Masks custody and back to the Legion.

  The battalion finished breakfast, checked in with Dr. Littlejohn and Dr. Rollins, got further clarification on their orders from General Overstreet, and crossed Fort Bastion to the loading dock.

  How strange it felt to interact with all these people. They looked human—as human as any soldiers from the battlefield.

  Rhodes knew now that he wasn’t at Fort Bastion. Fort Bastion didn’t exist. He was on a Masks vessel, but the Masks still maintained the illusion for some reason known only to themselves.

  Maybe they needed some way to merge the fake environment with the sensations all these drugs caused, but Rhodes didn’t think about it too hard. He had bigger problems to deal with.

  The battalion stopped on the loading dock and Rhodes gazed out over the landscape—the real landscape this time.

  The Grid gave him real-time feedback on the battle already underway out there. The Masks bombarded the city from all sides.

  For maybe the first time since the Masks started this invasion, the Legion held its own.

  The Masks threw the full might of their force against the Legion’s defense, but the Legion held the perimeter.

  The Grid didn’t lie. The big defensive guns the Legion set up in the buildings offered better protection than anything the Masks could throw at them.

  The Masks’ invasion ships tried to move in to destroy the buildings, but the defensive guns held them off, too.

  Ravagers occupied the invasion ships while Legion Dusters and Predator fighter craft bombarded the Masks’ ground troops. The Masks couldn’t set foot inside the city.

  Rhodes launched off the loading dock. His brain kicked into high gear trying to come up with a way to talk some sense into his subordinates before they actually got to the city.

  This would be the perfect time for them to turn. They only had to get behind the Legion line. The Masks wouldn’t be able to get to the battalion there.

  How true was that, though? Would the Masks keep their control over the battalion even then? How far away would the battalion have to get before they broke the connection?

  Rhodes glanced sideways at his subordinates, and once again, he found Dietz at his side. Dietz glanced at Rhodes at the same moment, and again, they shared a moment of unspoken understanding.

  Almost as if Rhodes’s thoughts made it happen, Lauer murmured, “Are we really doing this? Are we really bringing down our own people….for what?”

  Rhodes’s heart soared. “Now’s our chance to get back to the Legion. We’ll fly toward those buildings the way the Masks ordered us to. Then we’ll fly behind the line and….”

  “You traitor!” Rhodes expected Fuentes to protest, but he was wrong. Coulter turned on Rhodes and flew at him trying to grab Rhodes by the throat. “You son of a bitch!”

  Coulter managed to get his hands around Rhodes’s neck, but the mechanical rods and metal housing stopped Coulter from doing any damage.

  Lauer and Dietz both dove for Coulter to drag him off. “Eddie!” Lauer roared. “Eddie—think about what you’re doing! We’re Legion soldiers! These are our own people! The Masks are tricking you! They’re tricking all of us with this fake shit!”

  Lauer and Dietz managed to drag Coulter off, but he kept raging out of control. He struggled against their hold, yanked his arm sideways, and fired his thermal cannon at Rhodes.

  The shot sailed wide, but it snapped all of them to high alert. Rhodes braced himself for something else to go wrong—and that’s when he noticed Rhinehart, Thackery, and Fuentes still racing toward the city.

  “Come on! We gotta catch up with them!” he called to Lauer and Dietz. “We have to stop them!”

  Rhodes took off flying his fastest toward those two tall buildings in the distance. Fusion blasts erupted from their highest windows.

  Oakes stayed where he was. He hovered in midair staring at everything around him in a daze.

  Rhodes couldn’t waste any more time on him. Rhodes rocketed across the landscape, and for the hundredth time, he completely discarded the idea of trying to get through to Fuentes and Thackery.

  Rhodes swerved in front of Rhinehart. “Lieutenant—don’t do this! That could be your old platoon in there! You could have friends in there! They’re Legion soldiers—just like us! You can’t do this! You have to listen.”

  Rhinehart ignored him completely. Rhodes grabbed him by the shoulders, but Rhinehart just kept right on flying. He didn’t acknowledge Rhodes’s existence at all.

  Rhinehart’s eye glazed over. Rocky didn’t respond, either. He just stared past Rhodes at something in the distance.

  “Rocky?” Rhodes asked. “Can you hear me?”

  Nothing. “They’re drugged, Captain,” Fisher murmured.

  “Why are we aware, then?” Rhodes glanced over at Dietz. He was just catching up to Thackery while Fuentes kept racing toward the city.

  Rhodes saw the situation about to disintegrate into another slaughter. One person from Battalion 1 could wreak incredible destruction on the Legion defense.

  Fuentes could bring down those buildings by himself. Then the Masks would enter the city and it would all be over.

  Dietz came whizzing out of nowhere, grabbed Thackery, and took her to the ground in seconds. She fought him all the way down, smashed into the pavement, and wrestled herself out of his grip.

  He tried one last hopeless time to grab her before she launched herself into the air again. Her boosters flared….and she stopped.

  She drifted to a standstill a hundred feet in front of the buildings. Her eyes darted all over the battlefield. She didn’t move except to dodge a fusion charge from one of the windows.

  Lauer caught up with her. “Alyssa! Don’t do this! The Masks are using you! You can’t turn against the Legion.”

  She didn’t attack—either him or the buildings. Dawning realization spread across her face and her eyes narrowed at the Masks in the distance.

  Lauer floated in front of her and extended his hand to touch her shoulder. At that moment, some unseen force took hold of him, jerked him around, and he fired at one of the buildings.

  He roared and his lips curled back in a grimace of something like pain or rage. He burst into a spasm of convulsions trying to fight his guns away from the city.

  Thackery grabbed him to help restrain him, but he whipped around and clubbed her backhand across the face to knock her away.

  Through all the confusion, Fuentes kept sprinting toward the buildings. He unleashed four Vipers to blow the first building to kingdom come.

  Those Vipers corkscrewed away from the ports on his back and crossed paths to separate and target both buildings.

  Out of nowhere, another blinding missile streaked across the landscape and all four Vipers collided with Rhinehart. He flew directly into their path and a catastrophic explosion slapped him out of the sky.

  He sailed into one of the buildings and slammed into the wall with bone-crushing force.

  At that moment, three Masks invasion ships and two Ravagers skimmed around the city closing on the battalion’s location.

  The invasion ships unloaded on the buildings and the defensive guns rotated up to defend the Legion position.

  Rhodes and Thackery spun around to fire on the invasion ships. Oakes caught up a second later and added his fire to theirs.

  It was too late. The Ravagers had already seen too many members of this battalion shooting at the Legion and killing Legion soldiers.

  The Ravagers fired on the invasion ships and then spat off scattered shots at the battalion. The Ravagers even fired at Rhodes, Oakes, and Thackery.

  Fuentes circled the building to target the Ravagers. Dietz was just about to defend the buildings from the Masks when he noticed what Fuentes was doing.

  Dietz skirted Rhodes to lunge for Fuentes, tackled him out of thin air, and the two men fell into a mid-air wrestling match trying to best each other.

  The Ravagers fired again and a brutal concussion hit both men. It nailed both of them into the ground and they didn’t get up.

  That left Rhodes, Oakes, and Thackery to defend the buildings alone. Rhodes fired dozens of Vipers at the invasion ships, but the Ravagers still didn’t get the message.

  Coulter came back to his senses and soared toward Rhodes and the others to help out, but before he got there, Lauer turned his weapons on the buildings.

  He fired his scourge guns and Thackery jumped in front of him. His shots hit the metal housing of her chest implants, but they didn’t take her down.

  Rhodes rushed over to try to get through the Lauer, and at that moment, an almighty boom struck the nearest building—the building Rhodes and his people had been trying so hard to defend.

  The shockwave hurled a massive tornado of broken blocks and twisted metal at the battalion, swept everyone away, and caught all three invasion ships and both Ravagers in the tidal wave.

  One of the Ravagers pivoted out of position and Rhodes and his people got trapped between that ship and the other nearest Ravager.

  He saw them about to collide, snatched Lauer out of the air, and whizzed free just as the two ships slammed into each other.

  An explosion went off somewhere. Koenig, Murphy, Dash, and Zen vanished off the interface. The exploding fireball of the two detonating Ravagers enveloped Rhodes and Lauer in a cloud of heat and burning fusion gas.

  End of Chapter 26

  ? 2024 by Theo Mann

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