Nic took off the helmet of his SimSuit and breathed in deeply. The scent of fresh coffee wafted past his nose. “Mom,” he called out. It was not a question, but more of a demand.

“Hmm?” she replied, poking her head in through the door of the Simnasium. “Nic, I made coffee. Do you want to try some?” She looked just like Magister Dana.

Nic smiled, relieved. He tugged off the rest of his SimSuit and let the ceiling wires retract it the rest of the way. “Yeah.”

“I even got real milk—none of the dehydrated stuff! Can you believe the freighter brought this? Here, I’ll pour you a cup. Sit down.” His mother took a strangely antiquated pot of coffee off the Corvette kitchen’s electric stove and poured it into two ceramic mugs, the kind Nic had only ever seen in the offices of Paradigm Prep’s important administrators. Something as fragile and decorative wouldn’t ordinarily have a place anywhere else.

“Smells great,” said Nic.

“Just don’t tell anyone I let you try any,” his mother warned him, stirring a spoonful of white sugar into the hot beverage. “I’d get in trouble if they found out I was giving a substance like this to a child. But what can one small cup hurt? Plus, yours is diluted with milk. There’s just enough coffee in there to taste.”

Nic took a seat on the nurse’s bench next to the classroom table sitting in the middle of the dining room, the plastic crinkling beneath him. He sipped from the warm mug and it tasted like nothing. He didn’t say anything, lest he hurt his mother’s feelings. “You’re here.”

“I sure am. I wouldn’t miss your first big day of Wargame! Wait... It is today, isn’t it? Not yesterday? Did you oversleep and miss it?”

Nic felt a sudden surge of panic and his heartbeat thrummed in his head. Then something clicked; the terror passed. “No, it’s today. Besides, I’m Squad Leader. Someone would have had to wake me at some point even if I did oversleep. RTIFIS would, at least.”

“Oh, that’s right,” said Nic’s mother, taking a swig from her mug. “Ah, I love this stuff. Did you know coffee was one of the first ten crops ever grown on another planet’s soil? Interesting how it seems so inessential for our survival, and yet it was such a high priority for terraforming pioneers. Perhaps it was useful in that way to show that not only could we survive on other worlds, we could thrive on them, too. Don’t you think?”

Nic nodded. “Maqsud told me something like that the other day.” There was a sudden knock at the door. All of a sudden, Nic and his mother dove under the classroom table to hide.

“It’s Principal Ferenc,” she whispered to him. “If he finds us, he’ll make me leave. He’s going to take me away from you, Nic.” The pulse-pounding terror followed him under the table. “I don’t want to go. I want to stay here and see how you’re doing.” More insistent knocking at the door. “You’ve made it! I knew you would. Nic, he’s going to take you away from me. You’ll remember what I told you, right? Nic? Are you up?”

“Nic?”

Nic opened his eyes in Bedroom 1. The dream bled seamlessly into his waking life, and a moment later, he understood why—another knock at his door. “I’m up,” he replied groggily.

“It’s, uh, like 10 o’clock our time,” said Jarek. “Made coffee if you want some.”

Embarrassed at oversleeping, Nic scrambled to his feet, made his bed in a hurry, and rushed out of his room into the common area of the Corvette. He was relieved to see everyone else also still in their pajamas. Shanti typically wore her pajamas at all times, sometimes for several days in a row—but it looked like the rest of his squad also slept in. Perri was just walking out of her room as well, her blond hair frizzy and disheveled with sleep.

“You two are the last to rise,” Maqsud said distractedly, busying himself in the kitchen. “You must have been having some good dreams, I trust?”

“None that I can remember,” Perri replied, scratching her scalp and yawning.

“I...” Nic hesitated to tell them the truth. “I had a dream about my mother.”

Max nodded. “After all this time, eh? I remember what those are like. I haven’t had one in a while, though.”

“I do probably once or twice a year,” Jarek chimed in, rummaging for drinkware.

“I dream about my dad maybe once a year,” said Perri. “I never really knew my mom that well.”

“None of us ever knew any of our parents well, Perri,” Maqsud snorted. “We’ve already lived twice as long without them as we did with them. The older we get, the smaller a footnote they’ll be in our distant memories.” If only, Nic thought. “I’ve taken the liberty of whipping up a nutritious breakfast for us. I hope everyone likes rehydrated eggs and rehydrated bacon-style protein sheets. As a species, we haven’t really improved upon breakfast much in the last few centuries, have we?”

“I’m sure they eat much better in Sol,” said Perri. “Heck, we ate better at PPI, didn’t we?” She stretched and her pajamas exposed a sliver of her pale midriff. Then she flinched, as if realizing her own implied ingratitude. “I mean, thank you, though. Thanks for breakfast. Food is good!”

Max smiled and shrugged. “I suppose there’s only so much space in those ration crates. Aside from a few luxury items, our food is cost effective and energy-dense. No roughage for the foreseeable future, I’m afraid. A moment of silence for our poor gut microbiomes...”

“You talk like an alien sometimes,” said Nic. “Like, an actual space alien. Or you have some kind of hormonal disease that made you stop aging at 18 but you’re actually 40 or something. No offense.”

Maqsud shot them all a devious grin and waved his fingers over the protein sheets crackling in the skillet. “And now you’re all stuck with me, my little children!”

“Bro, that was too creepy,” Jarek laughed, smirking and shaking his head disapprovingly. He poured coffee from the pot into five plain plastic mugs. “This container says ‘Powdered Cream’ if, uh... anyone wants some.”

Nic took one scoop for his coffee and stirred it in before sipping. The coffee still tasted somewhat bitter, but it was hot and energizing, and that was all that mattered to him in the moment. Perri dumped in three generous scoops. Jarek and Maqsud took theirs black. Shanti, meanwhile, didn’t take her cup at all, and no one said anything about it. Nic felt that every interaction with Shanti so far had been uncomfortably one-sided and possibly burdensome to her.

Max doled out five equal portions of scrambled egg-product and a sheet of rubbery pseudo-bacon each for everyone in the squad, all of it steaming hot. Nic tore into his breakfast hungrily. He watched as Shanti nibbled at her protein sheet but didn’t touch her eggs. “You should eat up,” Nic offered meekly. “We have a big day ahead of us, you know. First mission.” He pointed to her untouched eggs. “You should eat your—”

Suddenly, Shanti’s gaze pierced his own so fiercely that his words caught in his throat. But she didn’t seem angry or upset. There was so much vitality behind her eyes that Nic realized he had been treating her like a ghost or an animal this entire time, someone not really present in the same way as the rest of the squad. She covered her mouth with one hand and shook her head ‘no.’

“Oh, um,” Nic replied uncertainly. “...Sure. That’s fine. We can refrigerate them for you to have later.” Shanti shook her head again and returned her gaze to her meat substitute. “You don’t like eggs.” She didn’t reply this time, but the message got through to Nic loud and clear. Maybe that’s why she covered her mouth—the eggs would make her feel sick, he thought. They might make me feel the same if I weren’t so hungry. Wonder if that’s why she’s so skinny—maybe she just can’t stand certain foods...

Before he could ruminate more on the inner workings of his silent squadmate’s mind, RTIFIS interrupted them with a notification.

said the AI.

“Well, this trip kinda flew by,” Jarek said through a mouthful of eggs. “This is it!”

Max downed the rest of his coffee. “I think we’ve all had more than enough Arena practice thanks to our fearless leader. Wouldn’t you agree?” Jarek and Perri nodded. “I’ll be hearing RTIFIS giving me alerts in my sleep.”

said RTIFIS.

“There it is again!”

“Play it,” said Nic.

“Hey there, team!” said Hansen Dyne on their living room screen. “This is it. You’re about to commence your very first mission to an exciting new planet full of possibilities! By this point, you’ve probably spent plenty of hours in your Simnasium practicing Wargame. Your squad leader has also prepared you for the competition and strengthened your group cohesion with team-building exercises. Everything has led up to this moment. Remember, you’re not just fighting for the fantastic rewards you’ll receive if you win—you're not even fighting solely for Red Terraforming. You’re fighting for humanity’s future in a galaxy teeming with potential! All it asks of us is our hard work and determination. Winning your first planet is just one step in the history of a colony that will outlive us all. How incredible is that?”

“And I thought I liked to hear myself talk,” Maqsud sighed over the beacon, lacing his fingers behind his head and leaning back in his chair.

“...and be the best soldiers you can be. For Red Terraforming—and for humanity! This is Hansen Dyne signing off.” He smiled charismatically at the camera. “Clotilde, it’s doing that thing again where it won’t turn off. Will you just—” The message ended.

Nic gathered up everyone’s dirty dishes and carried them to the Corvette’s dishwasher. “Don’t suppose we have time for another round of Arena before—”

“Nicolas, trust me,” said Maqsud, “we have practiced as much as five people can reasonably be expected to practice in the time allotted. We know the weapons, the grenade variants—”

“We never practiced the highest difficulty. Come on, 20 minutes—”

“Nic.” Max placed a hand on his shoulder. “If we lose at this point, we can only chalk that up to destiny.”

Nic shook his head. “No. We won’t lose. We’re going to win.”

Jarek snapped his fingers and pointed at Nic with both hands, saying, “That’s the spirit, Squad Leader!”

I know I have enough spirit for the five of us combined, Nic thought. I just don’t know if that’ll propel us to victory.

They spent the rest of their journey each doing their own thing in the living room. Nic paced anxiously back and forth in front of the bedroom doors. Jarek did a few push-ups, followed by miming gun positioning and grenade throws. Perri twiddled her thumbs as she stared out the front viewscreen at warping spacetime. Maqsud leaned back in a reclining seat on the couch and shuffled his deck of cards, bridging them deftly, punctuating the silence with the crisp sound of fresh cardstock slapping cardstock. Shanti merely existed there like a shadow staring off into a space of her own creation.

Then the viewscreen changed. The bulging bubble flattened out before their eyes, replaced by a more conventionally-shaped array of stars.

said RTIFIS.

“Wait, deploy?” asked Perri. “They’re not coming with us? I’m confused.”

Nic got chills at how direct and human that response sounded. He knew that RTIFIS had thousands upon thousands of pre-programmed responses triggered by common questions and cultivated by machine learning, but he forgot that RTIFIS was still an artificial intelligence and could calculate its own answers on the fly.

“Seems like overkill to me,” Jarek offered with a shrug. “Are these ships not sturdy enough or what?”

“We’d do well to remember that bullets travel farther on planets with lower gravity and less air,” Max observed, showing off by shuffling cards from one hand to the other. “These weapons were all designed in a much different environment way back when.”

Nic heard a muffled clunk in the back of the ship and everyone turned their heads. said RTIFIS.

They made their way back to the Control Room just like they’d done upon takeoff. Nic watched everyone else strap themselves in before he took the front seat and buckled himself. The viewscreen showed a cone-shaped object race ahead of them, arcing off to the right as they neared their destination. Two more followed not far behind.

“Planet Gwher,” Nic sighed dreamily. “Team Scarlet’s first target. Soon to be our first win.”

No amount of perusing sims and holos featuring space travel could have adequately prepared Nic for this moment. For the first time in his life, he was about to touch down on a brand new planet—not just one he’d never been to before, but one that had only seen a few human visitors in all the billions of years since its creation. It was a breathtaking sight.

The planet was beige with striations of brown across its surface, dusty with modest polar ice caps and a few wispy clouds. The whole thing could have been gray-on-gray for all Nic cared—it was thrilling all the same. He smiled from ear to ear and his pulse raced.

Nic floated for only a brief few seconds, tethered safely in his harness, until the ship rumbled slightly when it went from vacuum to the thin atmosphere already present on this planetary candidate. It was much smoother than the ascent from Ayrus—which itself, he reasoned, must have been smoother than entering or exiting the atmosphere of a planet like Earth, Mars, or Iuxta. He thought briefly of having to step out of their Corvette in an airsuit and the thought panicked him. It passed.

Nic unbuckled himself and led his squad back to the Simnasium. He was giddy, brimming with energy that made him want to sprint laps around a track or do cartwheels. The others looked to be a mixture of excited and wary; he didn’t blame them. It was their first foray into the planet-capturing business. Honestly, he’d have been more concerned if they’d seemed at ease.

Nic made sure each of his squadmates donned their SimSuits before he put on his own. The Corvette’s system connected remotely with the distant modules and he felt the telltale shove of his proxybot activating.

said RTIFIS. Nic felt a tickle of frisson. His proxybot’s eyes “opened” as its ocular cameras activated, and he saw the surface of Planet Gwher through mechanical eyes—well, it was at his sides and behind him. Directly in front of him was a plain astrosteel wall that looked to be embedded in the ground.

He glimpsed his squadmates’ bots as well. They were all colored the same shade of red. Nic’s HUD tagged each of them with names hovering over their heads just like in the Final Exam—only this time, he saw their actual names.

JAREK [##########]100% PERRI [##########]100% MAQSUD [##########]100% SHANTI [##########]100%

On the back of Perri’s proxy’s neck, he saw a small printed serial number just above the spinal joints, along with the label “PROPERTY OF RED TERRAFORMING, INC.”

I did it, Nic thought. Just like you knew I would. I’m doing it! He wondered if his mother would still be alive by the time he retired—if she was surviving out there in the galaxy somewhere, and if maybe he could find her once his planet-capturing duties were done. He wanted to tell her all about it already. In this moment, a wave of optimism washed over him like hadn’t felt in years.

But he had no time to think. Team Scarlet’s proxies reached back to unstrap their SMGs automatically.

With a loud metallic clank, the astrosteel wall before them retracted suddenly into the ground—as did another one some 10 meters or so ahead of them. Nic laid eyes on his first opponents, a group of five blue-tinted proxybots with their SMGs already drawn. Team Azure.

Standing on an alien planet, Nic aimed his SMG and opened fire.