Dr. Osborne and Dr. Trudeau stopped in the corridor outside the Ocao Space Station conference room.

  Dr. Osborne sighed heavily. “I guess the decision isn’t anything we didn’t already expect. Still, it seems like a waste.”

  “Admiral Stabler is right,” Rhodes replied. “This project never should have gotten off the drawing board.”

  “But you’re already here,” Dr. Trudeau pointed out. “It isn’t perfect, but if you’re functional enough to risk your life to save Legion soldiers, why waste that?”

  “It doesn’t matter because the panel won’t reverse the decision,” Dr. Osborne murmured. “Come on, Captain. I know your people are anxious to see you.”

  The three of them set off through the station’s many corridors and elevators—back in the direction from which the three men had come.

  It took a long time for them to get back to the Ero. The trip and the view of Ocao gave Rhodes plenty of time to think.

  He didn’t really mind the idea of the inquiry panel taking Battalion 1 offline. Rhodes himself had been thinking the same thing for weeks—maybe even months. How long had this been going on anyway? He lost track of time while he was with the Masks and while he was in so many conversion cycles.

  Staying alive or going offline—what difference did it make in the end? He probably would have made the same decision if he’d been on the panel.

  He couldn’t even really pinpoint why he argued for them to keep him alive. It wasn’t just a desire to take his revenge against the Masks.

  Maybe he was just too stubborn to give up that easily. Maybe the primal will to survive kept him going even when his rational brain told him it wasn’t a good idea.

  Fisher didn’t say a word all the way back to the Ero. He didn’t comment positively or negatively on what Rhodes said to the officers.

  Rhodes would have liked to talk to Fisher about all of this—now that the inquiry was over. Rhodes couldn’t do that in front of the doctors. That would be a private conversation between him and Fisher—the way it should be.

  The two doctors accompanied him back to the capsule hold that had always been the battalion’s barracks on board this ship.

  The doctors didn’t enter with him. They left to go back to their lab. They left him to reunite with his subordinates on their own terms.

  Everyone jumped up and made a big deal about Rhodes’s return. “We thought they’d keep you in the brig forever,” Thackery told him.

  “We did not,” Coulter countered. “They had to let him out so he could go through conversion cycles. They couldn’t keep him there without risking his health.”

  “Is it true the brass is sending you to a disciplinary inquiry?” Oakes asked.

  “They already did,” Rhodes replied. “I just came from there.”

  Everyone jolted. “You did? What did they decide?”

  “They’re thinking about what to do with us. They’re considering taking us offline.”

  A hush fell over the group. “They better not,” Rhinehart snarled. “I’ll fight back. I won’t go willingly.”

  “You were the one who said you might do it yourself,” Rhodes reminded him. “We’ve all been there.”

  “That was before,” Rhinehart countered. “I didn’t go through all that with the Masks for nothing. I didn’t fight my way back here so I could get taken offline by my own people. Doing it to myself is one thing. That’s my choice. No one is going to do it for me. Hell no.”

  “We should have stayed with the Masks,” Fuentes muttered. “We could have stayed at Stonebridge.”

  “No, we couldn’t have and we aren’t having that conversation,” Lauer fired back. “We’re in this mess because they made us kill Legion soldiers. If we went back, they would do the same thing again and we would kill even more soldiers. We aren’t even talking about that.”

  “What are we going to do, then?” Thackery asked. “What can we do?”

  “We’ll go on the run,” Rhinehart suggested. “We’ll steal our Strikers. Our SAMs will help us out. They won’t want the Legion to take them offline, either.”

  “Don’t do anything until you hear the panel’s decision,” Rhodes told them. “They might decide to keep us around for a while.”

  “That’s even worse,” Rhinehart sneered. “So a bunch of officers we don’t even know get to decide if we live or die? This is no way to live. We decide if we live or die.”

  “They’re worried we might do the same thing,” Rhodes pointed out. “They’re worried that one of us will snap in combat and turn a weapon on Legion soldiers again.”

  “Then why are they considering keeping us around?” Thackery asked.

  “Because I told them that we all want to end the Masks for good. I told them we all want payback for what they did to us and there’s no one else in the whole Treaty of Aemon Cluster that stands a chance of defeating the Masks.”

  Thackery gasped. “You told them that?! You said we wanted payback?”

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  “Of course. I do, at least. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I want to make the Masks understand that capturing us was their first and last mistake. I don’t care if I have to spend the rest of my life doing it. Them capturing us is going to be the beginning of the end of their whole stinking race.”

  Everyone stared at Rhodes in stunned shock when he finished speaking. He didn’t see why they considered what he said so astounding or outrageous. He was only surprised the others weren’t thinking the same thing.

  Rhinehart sank down at the table and stared at his hands on top of it. “I guess that’s it, then.”

  “What’s it?” Rhodes asked. “They haven’t come to their decision yet.”

  “I mean, if we’re going for payback, we have to do it with the Legion, don’t we? We have to sign ourselves up to be their dogs again.”

  “What’s the alternative—going over to the Masks?” Rhodes countered.

  “Yes,” Fuentes interjected.

  “Don’t ever let me hear you say that again, Corporal,” Rhodes snapped. “Not ever.”

  “What if he’s right, though?” Thackery asked. “Why should we be loyal to the Legion if they could do something like this to us?”

  “Compared to what the Masks did to us?”

  Rhodes looked back and forth between Thackery and Fuentes. He couldn’t decide which of them deserved a smackdown more.

  In the end, he settled on Fuentes. “I just staked my life on proving to the Legion that we’re still loyal. I just risked my ass to convince these people that the drugs and The Grid and all the Masks’ treatment caused you to snap on the battlefield and kill those soldiers even when you knew exactly what you were doing.”

  Fuentes looked away. That one action shattered what little was left of Rhodes’s patience.

  He seized Fuentes and spun him around to confront him. “You look at me when I talk to you, Corporal. You were the one who signed up to join the Legion. No one made you do that. I just bet all our lives on you at least trying to put right what you did wrong. If you don’t want to serve the Legion and protect your family anymore, you go right on ahead and take yourself offline right now. You don’t have to wait for the brass to do it for you—but I swear to God, I will never let any of you go back to the Masks—not ever. I’ll kill any of you before I let the Masks get their hands on you again. I can’t risk the Masks using any of you against the Legion again.”

  Dead silence answered him. He felt his nerves nearing the breaking point.

  That was the moment when Fisher finally spoke for the first time. “Well said, Captain,” Fisher murmured.

  Rhodes couldn’t take it a second longer. He didn’t know how long he’d been in a conversion cycle in Dr. Osborne’s lab in between leaving the brig and going to the inquiry.

  It wasn’t nearly long enough to compensate for staying out of it for so long. He needed another one—maybe more than one.

  He couldn’t deal with his subordinates right now. He turned his back on them and walked over to his capsule. He hadn’t entered it since he returned from the Masks’ custody.

  He tapped the controls to open the cover. Someone had modified the settings since he left. The toxin filtration system had been boosted with special emphasis on removing Epliothil, Kreandian, and Plianor metabolites from his blood.

  Dr. Osborne must have prepared the capsule for Rhodes’s return. Good.

  The cover started to open when Oakes, Lauer, and Rhinehart came over to him. “We’re still loyal to the Legion, Sir,” Rhinehart murmured. “You don’t have to worry about us.”

  “I know that, Lieutenant,” Rhodes husked. “I never doubted any of the three of you.”

  “What about me?” Lauer growled. “I know you doubted me.”

  Rhodes had no choice but to face him. “A lot of bad shit happened to all of us while we were the Masks’ prisoners, Lieutenant. The drugs, The Grid, and the torture played games with all our heads.” Rhodes found himself gripping Lauer’s shoulder. “I saw you during the battle, Lieutenant. I saw you resisting the control to fire on those soldiers. I’ll never forget that.”

  Lauer lowered his eyes to the floor. His lips and cheeks spasmed all over the place and his voice cracked with buried emotion. “We should have done more. We should have resisted harder. We should have…..done something……We never should have let it happen…..”

  “They drugged us to make sure it happened, Lieutenant.” Rhodes fought down a lump in his throat. He would never forget everything that happened during that battle, especially not his own part in it. “Whatever guilt you’re carrying, I’m carrying it, too. We all are. Try to remember that. Now I gotta get some sleep before I fall over. I’ll see you all when I wake up. Try not to worry about it too much. I know it’s hard not to, but worrying about it won’t change the outcome.”

  He stretched out on the mattress in his capsule. He tried not to look around at the others, but he wound up doing it anyway.

  The last thing he saw before he locked into the prongs was Jairo Dietz sitting across the hold. He propped his hip against the table watching and listening to everything that went on between the rest of the battalion.

  A question mark still hung over Dietz, but Rhodes didn’t doubt any longer that Dietz was loyal to the Legion, too.

  Rhodes would have liked to question Dietz about what exactly he experienced and didn’t experience with the Masks, but that would have to wait.

  Rhodes closed his capsule cover, shut his eyes…..and came face to face with Fisher.

  Rhodes found himself shrinking under Fisher’s unwavering gaze. Rhodes couldn’t bring himself to open the dialogue he knew he needed to have with Fisher.

  Fortunately, Fisher did it for him. “Do you think the battalion will try to run from the panel’s decision?”

  “None of us can run. We have nowhere to run to. It’s the Legion for us or going offline. We don’t have any other choices.”

  “Were you telling the truth about getting payback from the Masks?” Fisher asked.

  Rhodes’s eyes shot open. He opened his mouth to insist that Fisher already knew about that.

  Then Rhodes remembered that Fisher didn’t know. The connection between them had been so patchy while they were the Masks’ prisoners.

  Rhodes couldn’t rely on Fisher knowing anything Rhodes had been thinking then. Fisher might even have dismissed Rhodes’s outright threats against the Masks as the ravings of a tortured man in distress.

  Fisher couldn’t know about the other times—the times when cold, murderous determination took over Rhodes’s soul. Fisher had been dead in the barn when Rhodes killed every last man, woman, and child in Stonebridge.

  Rhodes shut his eyes, but he couldn’t shut out Fisher. “Yes, I was telling the truth. Someone has to stop them. The battalion is the only force in the whole Cluster that might be able to do it.”

  “How will you do it when you can’t fight them on your own? You’re here now because you couldn’t fight them.”

  “I don’t know how I’ll do it, but I have to find a way. This can’t go on. Maybe this last trace of a connection between us will turn out to be useful in some way.”

  “The brass would take you offline for sure if they knew about it,” Fisher remarked.

  “They already know about it. You heard what General Hyde said when I first showed up to the inquiry. They want me to use the connection against the Masks. That might be the tipping point. It might give us some information about how they do things—some way we can defeat them.”

  “I sure hope you’re right. We won’t be able to defeat them the way things are going now. They’re too powerful.”

  Rhodes didn’t answer. He entered his conversion cycle as much to get out of the conversation as for any other reason.

  He had no clue how to go about defeating the Masks, but he knew now that he had to do it. The process that started in Stonebridge already carried him forward onto another journey. He couldn’t see the end of it, but he knew one thing for sure now.

  That journey only ended one of two ways. Either he destroyed the Masks down the last individual and put a stop to their invasion forever….or he wound up dead.

  There would be no middle ground, no compromise, and no negotiation in this. It was him or them with nothing in between.

  End of Chapter 9.

  ? 2024 by Theo Mann

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