Battalion 1

Beeping noises woke Rhodes from a sound sleep. He blinked and then flinched when blinding, stark white light stabbed him in the eyes.

He had to think before he remembered where he was—except that he didn’t know where he was. He had been on the battlefield until just a few seconds ago.

He definitely wasn’t there now.

A young woman with long, straight, dark brown hair and glasses stood next to his bed.

She wore her hair pulled back in a ponytail behind her neck. She wore a business suit under a knee-length lab coat with her name stitched onto the front of it. Dr. Veronica Neiland, ALMC.

Rhodes groaned and tried to look around again. ALMC. The Aemon Legion Medical Corps.

He must be in a military hospital—which made sense considering what happened to him on the battlefield—except that it didn’t make sense.

He would be the first of thousands or maybe millions of Legion war casualties to end up in the hospital. He should have died on the battlefield.

He craned his head off the pillow, but his whole body felt unbearably heavy. It took all his strength just to lift his head. He couldn’t lift any of his limbs. He felt sick to his stomach.

“Where am I?” he croaked.

“You’re at Coleridge Station, Captain Rhodes,” Dr. Neiland clipped in a soft, steady tone.

“I never heard of it.”

“It’s a secret military installation that doesn’t appear on any map. No one has heard of it.”

He collapsed back on the pillow and shut his eyes. He was really starting to wish he did die on the battlefield. “What am I doing here, then?”

“You’ve been asleep. It will take you a while to get your strength back and to orient yourself. There’s nothing to worry about. The nausea and weakness will pass.”

He tried one more time to sit up and failed. He lifted his head and spotted four other people in the same room.

The room itself looked like a giant science lab with a bunch of equipment he didn’t recognize. It didn’t look like a hospital at all.

A giant cylindrical stack of computer components occupied the center of what looked like a circular chamber. Banks of more computers, equipment, and random wires, tubes, and conduits covered the walls.

Some of these random wires, tubes, and conduits even extended from the ceiling and walls. The wires, tubes, and conduits entered the central column of computer equipment and some came toward Rhodes’s bed.

Dr. Neiland approached him on his right side and tapped at a computer console attached to his bed. That’s what made the beeping sound.

The bed did something and started to tilt upward. It locked in place at an angle so he no longer lay flat on his back.

The longer he lay here, the more his mind cleared. He wasn’t in a normal hospital bed at all. The mattress under him was the only normal part of it.

Even that didn’t feel like a regular mattress. There was something different about it, but he couldn’t quite place what was wrong with it.

More computer equipment surrounded him on all sides and a solid metal cover levered above his head.

Computer screens flashed and flickered on the cover’s underside. The readings kept changing every time Dr. Neiland punched one of her buttons.

The wires, tubes, and conduits went into and out of all of this equipment attached to his bed. He couldn’t tell at first what it was all for.

He tried again to sit up and he raised his hand to rub his face. “What happened to me? How did I get here?”

His hand touched his head—and he felt something metal attached to his face. His arm and hand didn’t feel right, either.

He looked down at his hand and his world stopped when he saw his arm. It wasn’t a human arm anymore. It had been replaced by a robotic arm and hand.

“You got injured on the battlefield,” Dr. Neiland replied in the same soothing undertone. “We brought you here and replaced your arm and some of your internal organs with implants. We also modified your sensory, nervous, and motor systems with upgraded components. Don’t worry. You’ll get used to them in time.”

He barely heard her. He stared at his arm, moved his hand in every direction, and experienced another wave of vertigo at the sensation.

His arm and hand moved the same way a normal arm would, but it didn’t feel the same. He couldn’t identify the sensation. It felt surreal….or maybe not real at all—but it was.

He rubbed his fingertips together. He could feel everything. The sensation up his arm felt the same as normal skin—but it wasn’t skin.

Components he didn’t recognize covered the surface. Ports and channels scored the outer housing, but the metal surface blended together to make the outer housing smooth. He didn’t see any working parts, but there must be.

He lost his arm on the battlefield. He remembered now.

These doctors didn’t reattach his original arm. They wouldn’t have been able to after the laser severed it. No one could repair an injury like that.

He touched his face—with that hand. He felt the metal attached to his face.

He followed the outline from his forehead over his cheekbone and down to his jaw. The implants embedded into the bone and he sensed them penetrating deep inside his head.

The implants covered part of his forehead and all of his right eye socket. The implant blocked his eye, but he could still see perfectly well. His vision looked normal.

The implants on his face felt just as smooth as his arm’s metal housing. They covered the right half of his face, his right ear, and most of the back of his skull.

The rest of his face felt normal. He still had hair growing out of the rest of his scalp and his mouth felt normal, too.

Dr. Neiland tapped on her machines a few more times and looked up at him through her glasses. “You should feel strong enough to sit up now, Captain. If you are, we can take you to your quarters and you can start to orient yourself to the station.”

“What am I doing here?” he husked.

“I told you. We brought you here to repair your injuries. You’re a member of an experimental project to upgrade your injured limbs and organs with these mechanical implants. You’ll spend your recovery here at Coleridge Station until you learn to use them. Then you’ll redeploy on the battlefield where you’ll use these implants against the enemy.” She blinked at him. “Is that clear enough for you? Do you understand now?”

He groaned again, but he couldn’t keep lying here. He tried one more time to sit up, and this time, he succeeded. The upward tilted angle of the bed made it easier. He didn’t have to move as far.

He heaved himself off the bed and swiveled his legs to the floor—but they weren’t human legs. The same smooth mechanical housing covered him from the waist down.

He couldn’t tell where his real legs ended and where the robotic legs began—or if he even had real legs anymore. How much damage did he suffer when that Duster crashed on top of him?

The replacement arm melded with another swath of components surrounding his shoulders and part of his chest. Some of his rib cage and abdomen showed between the chest section and the part extending down over his pelvis.

The implants on his left arm didn’t enclose the whole arm the way they did his right arm. His left arm must have still been mostly intact when the Legion took him off the battlefield.

Components and implants dotted his skin from the left shoulder section down the outside of his upper arm. The implants surrounded his elbow in a mechanical joint and then narrowed around his forearm.

The components completely enveloped his wrist and his left hand. He couldn’t see anything organic underneath, but his left hand felt different from his right hand.

He couldn’t exactly say his left hand felt more real or more human because it didn’t. It just felt different.

He paused there slumped on the edge of the bed to take all this in. The implants embedded in all his bones and muscles. A dull ache throbbed through his body where these machines sank their roots into his very being.

He couldn’t call it pain because it didn’t hurt—and yet it did. It hurt deeper than pain.

He could tolerate this ache, but it ate away at something even more fundamental than his senses. It changed him at his core. He wasn’t human anymore—not the way he was before.

Dr. Neiland bent over him and did something to the component near his ear. “The implants take time to adjust to your nervous system. They feel strange now, but you’ll get used to them.”

Rhodes doubted that. He didn’t see how he could ever get used to this.

These things weren’t him. They chewed into his body, his blood, his bones, his internal organs. He even sensed them infecting his brain and senses. Where would it end?

It wouldn’t end because they were a part of him now—and yet they felt alien. They felt like they might fall off at any moment—but they would never fall off.

His very being wanted to reject them and push them away, but they stuck to him with a deep, gnawing, unbreakable hold.

“You should be able to stand up now, Captain,” Dr. Neiland told him.

Rhodes looked around one last time, but his mind didn’t want to accept any of this.

If he’d been getting out of a hospital bed any other time, he would have had to put on some clothes. He didn’t have to do that now.

He was a robot from the waist down. He had no other recognizable human anatomy he needed to cover up.

The implants covered all of him besides his midsection, his back, part of his chest, his left arm, neck, and half his head. No one could see anything. He was as dressed as he could possibly be.

The four other people in the room stood by the lab’s central stack of computer equipment. This wasn’t a hospital. It was a lab and he was the experiment. Dr. Neiland even said so.

Two of those other people wore medical lab coats like she did. One of those other people was a middle-aged man with greying hair and a grey goatee. The other was a younger man with straight brown hair, brown eyes, and glasses.

The other two people over there wore Aemon Legion officers’ uniforms. They were both men in their forties and one of them was a general. The other was a colonel with black hair and black eyes.

The general had bright red hair, brilliant green eyes, and a million freckles. They looked strange on a man his age—like he couldn’t decide if he was growing up or staying a boy.

Now that Rhodes looked around more closely, he noticed other technicians in lab coats working on the equipment lining the walls. They didn’t pay any attention to Rhodes, Dr. Neiland, or the other four people in the room.

An elevated circular platform ran around the lab’s upper wall. More technicians worked up there, too.

“Stand up, Captain,” Dr. Neiland told him. “We need to check that all your systems are functioning within operable parameters.”

His brain didn’t want to register that she was talking about him this way—the way she would talk about some machine that had just gotten out of the repair shop.

He stood up, and at that signal, the four men crossed the room to approach him.

For some reason he couldn’t figure out, Rhodes’s eyes and mind read their four nametags in a split second.

He didn’t even have to look at the names stitched onto their lab coats. The four names entered his head automatically without him making the decision to read them.

The older doctor’s name was Dr. Steven Montague. The younger one was Dr. Derek Irvine. The general’s nametag read, Brewster. The colonel’s read, Kraft.

Just in case Rhodes doubted the evidence of his new enhanced senses, General Brewster stuck out his hand and gave Rhodes a huge, boyish smile. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Captain. I’m General Kenneth Brewster and this is Colonel Paxton Kraft.”

Rhodes shook the general’s hand without thinking. Rhodes started to say, “Good to meet you…..” but he used too much pressure and wound up crushing the general’s hand.

General Brewster grimaced, yelled in pain, and almost buckled to his knees before Rhodes realized what he was doing. He let go, but not fast enough.

“Aargh!” General Brewster howled and clutched his hand.

“I’m sorry…..” Rhodes stammered.

Dr. Neiland and the other two doctors raced over and started whizzing around Rhodes in a flurry.

“Nothing to worry about!” Dr. Irvine exclaimed. “It’s understandable until you get used to the implants. Your neuromotor system has been enhanced, so you’re stronger than you were before. Don’t worry! You’ll get used to it.”

General Brewster kept gasping and clutching his hand in pain. “It’s…..it’s all right…..Captain…..It isn’t your fault……”

“Come over here, General,” Dr. Neiland breezed. “I’ll X-ray your hand and we can repair the bones.”

She took him across the lab to one of the machines against the wall. General Brewster tried to smile at Rhodes.

Brewster probably hoped he was smiling in a reassuring way, but the general kept writhing and baring his teeth in obvious pain.

Rhodes didn’t know what to think watching Dr. Neiland take the general away. Rhodes only tried to shake the general’s hand. Rhodes didn’t think he used that much pressure, but he must have made a mistake.

Colonel Kraft stepped in front of Rhodes to block him from looking at General Brewster again.

“It’s an honor to finally meet you, Captain.” Kraft started to extend his hand, too, and stopped himself. “General Brewster is the commanding officer of Coleridge Station and I’m in command of Battalion 1. You and I will be working closely with each other.”

“What’s that? What’s Battalion 1?”

“It’s the new unit of soldiers like yourself who will receive these experimental implants. Battalion 1 will become an integral part of the Aemon Legion and an indispensable wing of our fighting force. Battalion 1 is critical to our mission of securing the quadrant from alien invasion and bringing peace to the Fringes.”

“Oh,” Rhodes muttered under his breath. “I see.”

Kraft waved behind him. “Come with me, Captain. I’ll show you around the station and explain things to you. The orientation process takes some time, so we all understand that you might be feeling a little out of your depth.”

“How long does it take?” Rhodes asked. “How long will I be like this?”

“Well…..” Kraft glanced at the two remaining doctors.

“The truth is, Captain, we don’t actually know how long it takes,” Dr. Irvine interjected. “You’re the first subject to go through the project.”

Rhodes’s head shot up. “I’m….what?”

“You’re the first subject to go through the project. You’ll take command of the first unit of Battalion 1 as soon as they wake up—but you’re the first to wake up.”

Rhodes’s throat went dry. “Does that mean others didn’t wake up?”

Dr. Irvine shuffled his feet and looked away. “I assure you everyone who goes through the project was injured to the point of death exactly the way you were. If we didn’t take them, they would be dead now—the same way you would be.”

Now it was Rhodes’s turn to look away. Maybe he would have been better off dying on the battlefield than…..this.

He didn’t say that out loud, though.

“Now you can understand why we’re so delighted to have you with us,” Irvine gushed. “All your systems seem to be functioning within operational parameters.”

He bent over the control panel on Rhodes’s bed—the panel Dr. Neiland had been working on when Rhodes first woke up.

Dr. Montague looked over Dr. Irvine’s shoulder to see the readings, but just then, Dr. Neiland came back with General Brewster.

He had his hand in a cast up to the wrist, but he smiled more easily now. “Please don’t think anything of it, Captain. We’re all too pleased to see you up and about to worry about a little thing like this.”

“I’m sure you are,” Rhodes muttered.

Everyone pretended not to hear him.

“If you’re feeling up to it, Colonel Kraft and I will show you around,” General Brewster went on. “The doctors can monitor your systems on the way and make sure you’re functioning properly. If everything works out, you can relax in your quarters until it’s time for you to go on duty.”

“What does that mean?” Rhodes asked. “What do you mean by putting me on duty?”

“You need to train with your new implants so you get used to them,” Dr. Neiland told him. “You’ll need to adjust how you do things and how you process information coming from your implants. We’ll make additional modifications as needed to ensure everything is working the way it’s supposed to.”

Rhodes didn’t like the sound of that, but what choice did he have? These implants told him loud and clear that he didn’t have one.

He couldn’t get his arm back—or his eye back—or anything else the doctors replaced.

They might have replaced his entire lower body. He would never get that back. He’d been on the point of death when they brought him in.

He still didn’t know what to think or how to feel about that, but he definitely didn’t have a choice about this.

These implants anchored into his bones. They hooked up to his brain and nervous system. He would never be able to get rid of them.

His gut told him to tear them out and throw them away. He wanted to rip them out with his fingernails, but he wouldn’t even be able to do that—not without killing himself.

Maybe that would have been better, but he didn’t get a chance to do that or even to think about it.

General Brewster waved across the lab again. “Follow me, Captain. You don’t need to stay in here any longer.”

End of Chapter 2