Rhodes stared up at Fuentes in stunned shock. Fuentes raised his fist again, but he didn’t punch Rhodes in the face the way he did before.

  Fuentes clenched his fist and aimed his scourge gun at Rhodes’s eye exactly the way Dietz did when he killed Henshaw.

  Rhodes saw the whole thing happen in a fraction of a second. The interface was still open from Rhodes showing Rhinehart the memory of Fort Bastion.

  In that moment, Rhodes understood with no doubt that Fuentes knew exactly what he was doing. He knew he came from the Legion. He knew everything that happened to the battalion since the Masks captured them on the battlefield.

  Fuentes bared his teeth to shoot Rhodes in the head.

  Rhodes raised his arm to defend himself. He could kill Fuentes right now. He probably should.

  How many times did he tell his subordinates to kill Dietz if he ever stepped out of line or threatened one of them?

  The Grid gave Rhodes an unbroken view of everything happening to him. The Grid slowed everything down.

  He could kill Fuentes right now or at least fire a weapon strong enough to throw him clear. Rhodes didn’t have to die.

  Some part of him absolutely refused to kill Fuentes. Everyone in the battalion went through the same agony Rhodes himself had been suffering all this time.

  Whatever Fuentes did was the project’s fault. The Battalion 1 project made Fuentes this. It made all of them this.

  It turned a simple, slow-witted kid into a raving killer. It took steadfast men like Rhodes, Rhinehart, Oakes, and Lauer and turned them into basket cases barely able to function. They couldn’t function at all.

  Rhodes raised his weapon to aim at Fuentes’s head. Rhodes really didn’t want to kill Fuentes, but he had to. What choice did he have?

  If Rhodes didn’t kill Fuentes, the whole battalion could get stuck here with no way out. They might stay prisoners for the rest of eternity.

  The distant boom of gunfire made up Rhodes’s mind for him. The Masks sent Battalion 1 into battle against the Legion. The Masks used Battalion 1 to kill Legion soldiers.

  Rhodes couldn’t let that happen. He couldn’t let even one person in the whole Battalion do that if he could possibly find a way to prevent it. He couldn’t leave even one person in the Masks’ custody.

  He charged his laser to cut Fuentes’s head off. That would be the quickest way to end this, but right at that moment, something very fast and very powerful smashed into Fuentes from the side.

  The force of impact tore Fuentes away, wrapped around Fuentes, and they bowled away before Rhodes realized what was happening.

  Fuentes and the projectile broke apart and rolled away from each other. Fuentes shot to his feet, and just as fast, Dietz sprang upright.

  Rhodes stared in amazement as Dietz planted himself between Fuentes and Rhodes.

  Fuentes kept right on coming. He lunged for Dietz, fired his boosters, and tried to veer around Dietz to attack Rhodes again.

  Dietz raised his scourge gun and fired directly into Fuentes’s chest. The blow made him stagger, but he corrected instantly and rushed Rhodes again.

  Dietz fired a second time with both his scourge guns. “Back off, Rudy!” Dietz bellowed. “Don’t make me use my Vipers on you!”

  Fuentes bared his teeth and roared at Dietz, but Fuentes’s eyes kept darting to Rhodes every few seconds. Fuentes really wanted Rhodes. Fuentes didn’t care about Dietz.

  Fuentes charged again, and this time, Dietz really did unload his Vipers on Fuentes. Both missiles smashed Fuentes in the chest, carried him fifty yards backward, and hammered him into the ground.

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  He flopped on the grass, rolled onto his hands and knees, and floundered to stay there so he didn’t collapse again.

  Rhodes interfaced with Fuentes to make sure he wasn’t too badly injured, but he wasn’t. He was just stunned.

  “I’ll restrain Rudy, Captain,” Van told Rhodes. “I’ll make sure he doesn’t attack again.”

  “We can’t trust that,” Rhodes replied. “He’s overcome you before. We have to get the rest of the battalion out of here.”

  He checked the rest of the interface. Rhinehart, Lauer, Coulter, and Thackery all flew over the battle to converge on Rhodes.

  Rhodes got to his feet and turned around to look into Oakes’s eyes. “You okay, Lieutenant?”

  Oakes nodded and his gaze darted around the battlefield. “What planet are we on?”

  “I don’t know, but the Legion line is up there.” Rhodes pointed at the mountaintops overhead. “We can fly up there and find the command dome. The Legion will take us back to Coleridge Station.”

  Fuentes bellowed again in wordless fury, staggered to his feet, and made another lunge for Rhodes.

  Dietz reacted impossibly fast, stepped between them, and unloaded a massive thump of some concussion out of his chest.

  The force hit Fuentes and took him down for good this time. Fuentes toppled and lay still on the ground.

  Now Dietz was the one who turned around and peered deep into Rhodes’s eyes. “You okay, Captain?”

  “Yeah!” Rhodes gasped. “Thank you, Sergeant.”

  Rhodes had to stop himself from saying anything else. He searched Dietz’s eyes for…..something. Dietz just saved Rhodes’s life. It wasn’t the first time.

  What if Rhodes had been wrong about Dietz all this time? What if there was some way to salvage Dietz—or maybe Dietz never needed to be salvaged at all.

  Rhodes tried to remember everything Dietz had ever done that made Rhodes think Dietz was a psycho waiting for his chance to stab the battalion in the back.

  What if Rhodes misread all those incidents? What if Dietz really had only been malfunctioning when he killed Henshaw—and when he pointed his gun at Oakes and offered to shoot Oakes to put him out of his misery?

  What if Dietz shooting his thermal cannon into Fuentes’s shoulder really was just a harmless joke?

  Rhodes didn’t have time to think about that right now. The battalion gathered around. Rhinehart, Lauer, and Oakes all acted as steady as ever. Coulter seemed fine, too.

  Rhodes didn’t see anything about Thackery’s behavior that caused him to doubt her, either.

  Now was not the time to make a detailed study of their mental states. “Let’s get up the mountain, find the command dome, and get behind Legion lines. We can work out the details later.”

  He glanced over at Fuentes. Rhodes planned to carry Fuentes off the field himself, but Dietz read Rhodes’s mind. “I’ll take care of him, Captain. You leave him to me.”

  “Leave him here,” Rhinehart growled.

  “We can’t,” Dietz pointed out. “The Masks would use him against the Legion. We have to take him.”

  “Come on,” Rhodes repeated. “Let’s get the hell out of here before something else happens.”

  He made one last survey of his subordinates. Fuentes’s life sign and brainwave readings were all still normal. Van would have told Rhodes if anything was wrong with Fuentes.

  Rhodes ignited his boosters and took off into the air. Dietz picked up Fuentes. He was still out cold.

  The battalion sailed over the landscape dodging Legion fusion shots, but they faded as the battalion climbed higher toward the ridge. The Masks’ invasion ships had already taken out all the defensive guns.

  Rhodes pivoted The Grid to find the best place to set down. He wanted to find a spot far enough in the rear so he and his subordinates wouldn’t get pulled back into the action.

  He made it halfway toward the farthest rear Legion flanks. He didn’t feel a thing.

  His body spun around without him doing anything. His arms swung up against his will and his lasers opened fire on the Legion soldiers.

  The rest of the battalion separated, whipped around fast, and all of them opened fire at the same time. Dietz dropped Fuentes and Fuentes magically snapped back to consciousness just in time to add his fire to the assault.

  Rhodes tried to stop himself from shooting at the Legion platoons, but that feeling only lasted for an instant.

  Just as fast, the same rush of exhilaration and thrilling pleasure took hold. He forgot everything he’d just been thinking and doing a minute before.

  He rushed into the battle shooting a thousand lasers in every direction. The soldiers turned around to face the battalion, but the platoons couldn’t defend themselves.

  The Masks made another push from the front, drove the platoons backward into the battalion’s fire, and hundreds of soldiers toppled in waves.

  Dusters, Predators, Ravagers, and Masks’ invasion ships converged from all over. Ravagers pounded the battlefield with hellish bombardments trying to hit the battalion, but the invasion ships intervened to defend the battalion from the worst of it.

  Rhodes stalked into the platoons laying waste to everyone in sight. The Grid gave him perfect targeting accuracy no matter how much smoke, debris, and exploding dirt clods got in his eyes.

  He picked out every man standing. Dusters and Predators detonated over his head until a Ravager exploded with a deafening concussion.

  Some signal came through the interface from somewhere. Rhodes didn’t recognize where it came from. He only knew the Masks wanted him and the battalion to fall back out of the firing line.

  He launched off the ground to get away from the chaos, but at that moment, the Masks hit another Ravager. A section of its hull ruptured right in Rhodes’s face.

  He heard a handful of his people yelling his name and then the Ravager exploded in another flaming ball of burning gas and fusion reactions.

  The shockwave caught Rhodes, carried him away from his subordinates, and then a different Ravager unloaded on him from fifty yards north.

  The shot knocked him to the ground and he crashed down on top of a destroyed Duster lying in a mountain of dead bodies.

  End of Chapter 24.

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