Lauer transformed himself into a Striker and Rhodes transferred Dietz to the cockpit. They accomplished the operation just in time before the Masks started to converge on their location again.

  “Go!” Rhodes ordered. “Get out of here! As soon as we make it past the air battle, the rest of you get out of the atmosphere and rendezvous with the Ero, too. Don’t stick around.”

  He didn’t wait for anyone to reply. He used his grid lines to flatten himself into a burrowing line moving under the mountains of bodies and rubble.

  Murphy took control of Coulter’s grid lines and morphed Coulter to match Rhodes’s shape. Lauer and Wild manipulated Dietz’s grid lines and squashed him to fit inside Lauer’s cockpit.

  Rhodes lost sight of them snaking through the landscape. The piles of Masks parts concealed them.

  The Grid didn’t work as well from in here, but Rhodes didn’t care so much about that. He dug into the mounds and found a concealed spot where he could still read the battle outside.

  The Masks ground troops and Legion platoons kept shifting from one part of town to another. They never stayed in one place for long.

  Rhodes checked the air battle. It was moving off, too. It left a clear area of sky between the city and the Legion fleet in orbit around the planet. The Ero was up there.

  Rhodes was just about to make his move when Fisher broke in on his thoughts. “We have a problem, Captain.”

  “Another one? What is it now?”

  “Listen.”

  Fisher did something else to The Grid. Rhodes had never seen anyone do anything like this. He didn’t know it was possible until Fisher did it.

  He widened The Grid so Rhodes could see the whole battlefield landscape. Then Fisher zeroed The Grid to one city block. It was on the other side of the firefight Rhodes and his men just left behind.

  The Masks ground troops and Legion platoons kept trading gunfire—but not all the Legion soldiers fought with the platoons.

  A squad of twenty soldiers had broken away from the rest to follow Rhodes and Lauer.

  This one squad tracked Rhodes and Lauer to the place Lauer set Rhodes down—the place where Rhodes and Lauer just separated.

  The Grid added audio to the visual reading of the soldiers’ movements. “I swear they just came this way,” a lieutenant told his men.

  “You’re dreaming, Scofield,” another returned. “You’ll never find them. They can hide anywhere.”

  “They betrayed the Legion,” Scofield fired back. “They attacked the platoons and killed hundreds of soldiers on Rono and again on Keonus. We have to find them and eliminate them.”

  “You better be careful what you wish for,” a third man added. “The brass wants these guys back alive. They never said anything about hunting them down and killing them.”

  “The brass doesn’t know what they’re doing—and you’re a damn coward, Malloy,” Scofield spat. “We lost a lot of good men in those battles. Do you want to be the one responsible for it happening again?”

  “We wouldn’t be,” Malloy pointed out. “The brass is making that decision.”

  “Why don’t you go back home and suck your thumb, then.” Scofield turned to the first man. “Did you find anything over there, Hollister?”

  Hollister passed a device back and forth across the ground. “I’m picking up disturbances in the underlayer over here. It’s leading in this direction.”

  The soldiers followed Rhodes’s trail. Whatever device Hollister was using definitely showed the soldiers which direction Rhodes went.

  This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

  “Great,” Rhodes muttered under his breath. “So they want revenge for what we did.”

  “There’s more, Captain. Look.”

  Fisher adjusted The Grid again. The soldiers were so busy tracking Rhodes that they didn’t see another group of Masks ground troops moving on the squad. The soldiers’ device didn’t show them that.

  “It seems a simple enough solution to let the Masks kill those men,” Murphy pointed out. “They won’t cause us any more problems.”

  “Letting the Masks kill those men will confirm to any survivors that we’re working for the Masks.” Rhodes checked on Coulter again. “I guess I can’t put him down here.”

  “What are you going to do?” Fisher asked.

  “I’m going to save those soldiers. I don’t have a choice. I can’t let the Masks wipe them out—not without doing something about it.”

  “I might be able to modify The Grid to create a protected place for Coulter down here,” Murphy suggested.

  Rio, Zion, and Enoch broke in on the interface. “Let us come down and pick up Coulter, Captain,” Rio suggested. “Don’t put him in any more danger than he already is.”

  “It’s too risky,” Rhodes replied. “Stay out of danger.”

  “All of this is too risky,” Fisher pointed out. “You can’t save everyone—especially not people who are trying to kill you.”

  Rhodes didn’t listen. He waited until the soldiers got closer to his position. The Masks circled the squad. The squad remained oblivious to the danger until the soldiers located Rhodes hiding right there under the rubble mounds.

  “He’s here!” Hollister called to his friends. “He’s right here!”

  “Stand by to open fire as soon as he tries to escape,” Scofield ordered. “You saw the way our Jackhammers brought him down earlier. We can bring him down again if we all hit him at once.”

  The soldiers gathered around Rhodes’s hiding place. They trained their Jackhammers on the debris over Rhodes’s head. “This is a terrible idea,” Fisher muttered.

  Rhodes made another instant decision. He could burst out of here, transform himself back into a Striker, blast into the sky, and get into orbit before the soldiers had a chance to land a single shot on him.

  The soldiers would fall to the Masks if he did that. The Masks might even attack the soldiers first. That would give Rhodes a perfect cover to take Coulter off the planet.

  Lauer and Dietz were already out in orbit heading for the Ero. Rhodes didn’t have to worry about them anymore.

  Rhodes just could not bring himself to be directly responsible for any more Legion deaths. These soldiers had a right to hate him. He did kill Legion soldiers—a lot of them.

  He always knew those men had friends and families somewhere. He didn’t blame any of them for hating him.

  Throwing himself in front of a gun wouldn’t bring those soldiers back, but he couldn’t run away and leave even more Legion soldiers to die. That was asking too much.

  He gathered his grid lines to make his move, but he waited until the very last minute. He had to make this count.

  “He isn’t coming out,” Malloy remarked.

  “I can see he isn’t coming out, genius!” Scofield snapped. “Fire on my order. We’ll blast the son of a bitch out. We won’t wait for him to launch.”

  “Are you sure about this?” Hollister asked. “These guys have more weaponry than a whole platoon put together.”

  “Just do what I tell you,” Scofield ordered. “He’s one guy. He can’t defeat all of us shooting at the same time.”

  The other soldiers exchanged glances behind Scofield’s back. At least the rest of the squad wasn’t as hysterically vengeful as Scofield.

  Plenty of other Legion soldiers were bound to be, though. They wouldn’t forget what the battalion did in Masks custody. The battalion was bound to come to a reckoning.

  Scofield opened his mouth and inhaled. “Fire!” he ordered.

  The moment he said that word, the Masks ground troops pivoted out of a side street and opened fire on the soldiers.

  Rhodes shot out of the pile with all his might—right into the path of the Masks’ fire. Their rifles smashed into his housing just as hard here as they did outside Dietz’s and Coulter’s hiding place.

  Rhodes spread his grid lines as wide as he could to take the assault. He blocked the Masks’ gunfire from hitting the soldiers, but the impact knocked him off his feet.

  He felt himself losing control of The Grid. He couldn’t hold onto Coulter anymore.

  The soldiers spun around to defend themselves, but Rhodes protected them from the Masks. The soldiers aimed their Jackhammers at his back, but they didn’t fire.

  They stared in shock as he lurched and staggered under the barrage. The Masks fired dozens of times before they realized they were hitting a member of the battalion instead of Legion soldiers.

  The force of the Masks’ rifle fire knocked Coulter away. Rhodes’s grid lines reverted back to their default state and he turned back into a man, but at least he could use his weapons now.

  He raised both arms and opened fire with everything he had. He still wouldn’t have been able to defend himself against so many Masks, but miraculously, Coulter snapped out of his stupor right at that moment.

  He stumbled away from Rhodes, caught his balance, and then he spun around and opened fire with his lasers, too.

  He fired five Vipers into the Masks. Those explosions startled Rhodes back to his senses.

  He fired his Vipers, too, held out one arm to his side, and yelled to the soldiers behind him. “Get back! Fall back to the platoon! Fall back!”

  Scofield stared at him in stupid shock. Hollister and Malloy recovered first.

  They grabbed Scofield by his arms and towed him into another street heading south.

  Rhodes swung his lasers forward. Coulter sidestepped closer to Rhodes and they both herded the soldiers out of danger until the Masks retreated in a different direction.

  End of Chapter 4.

  ? 2024 by Theo Mann

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