“Quite the shiner you got there, my friend,” Jarek said in the Corvette’s kitchen.

Nic held an ice pack to his bruised eye and cheekbone, wincing. “You should see the other guy.”

“I thought Max was in the gym?” Jarek grinned and elbowed Nic in the side. Just then, Maqsud walked up from the lower-level stairs, eyeing them both silently as he made his way to Bedroom 4. “So, you been hittin’ the sims pretty hard, huh?”

Nic nodded. “Yep... Gotta be ready.”

“I’m all for bein’ ready, but man to man, I gotta tell you that you smell subpar right about now, brother.”

“I had a feeling.”

“Just, like, in this closed environment, I figured it might be prudent for you to, uh, maybe scrub down a bit, you know?”

Nic held up his free hand. “I get it. RTIFIS says we still have another hour before we come out of the wormhole. I’ll grab a shower in a minute.”

Jarek rubbed his hands together and grinned. “Hey, did you hear where we’re goin’?” Nic shook his head. “Get this, man: we’re going to Ducenti. Fully terraformed, no airsuits required!”

“Huh. I would’ve thought we’d be closer to a less-populated colony.”

“Aren’t you hyped, though, man? This’ll be the first planet we’ve ever set foot on in our lives where we can actually breathe the air raw! We can feel the actual wind on our skin!”

Nic smiled for the first time since the Wargame. “Yeah. That’s great. This’ll be a nice field trip for us.” Deep down, though, Nic fretted about being away from the Simnasium for too long. Every minute spent getting the Corvette repaired was another minute of practice that he lost.

I can’t fail everybody again. And I can’t let the blame fall on me if we lose again.

But he could scarcely imagine that thought without panicking.

***

The repair shop on Ducenti was populated mostly by 60- to 80-something-year-old men puttering around with toolboxes and doing a lot of standing next to each other, nodding with their hands on their hips or arms folded. Team Scarlet’s Corvette stood parked in the large open-air repair yard outside. Two technicians in a basket crane tinkered with the ship’s water filtration system that was designed to fold out of the hull for easy repair.

The head of the operation was a man named Joe. He was a grizzled old man with wrinkled, leathery skin, gray hairs coming out of his nose and ears, but what startled Nic the most was the incessant shaking the man did. Tremors rattled his arms and his head, and if he weren’t on his feet, his legs would probably be trembling, too. Despite his better judgment, Nic couldn’t help but stare—only when he wasn’t being watched.

Or so he thought.

“Not to worry, kid, it’s only temporary,” Joe said gruffly, scrolling through a transparent tablet before setting it down on his desk. “That’s why you’re eyeballin’ me, right?”

Nic shook his head, mortified. “Oh, no, sir, I—”

“I don’t normally get this bad, you know. They ship in my treatments from Umar. Just, uh... The freighter’s a little behind schedule this month. My mistake not stocking up last time it was here. One syringe, though, and I’m good as new for weeks, I tell ya.” He massaged his left wrist with an unsteady right hand. “I used to be a proxy man, too, ya know.” He coughed a loud, wet cough. “Well, we, uh, that’s what the boys and I called it back in the day.”

“You captured planets,” Nic realized. He felt tempted to ask the man everything he knew about Wargame modes, but thought better of it—besides, he reasoned, RTIFIS was probably listening in anyway.

Joe nodded. “Mmm-hmm. We were Team Goldenrod. Yellow Expansion Industries, they had just rebranded under their new name at the time, and, uh...” The old man turned over a bolt-shaped part in his hand and put it back in his pocket. “I helped capture 17 planets before I retired at the ripe old age of 29.”

Wow, Nic thought, impressed. But the man’s story didn’t track. “You say you retired but you’re working at this repair shop.”

“Oh, I got enough credits to last me. That wasn’t the problem. I just got bored out of my blasted mind! This place here, I barely make anything. The rest of the guys are retired just like me. Somethin’ to keep the brain and the hands busy. With my condition, I need it even more than they do...” He looked at Nic with eyes full of wisdom, like he knew exactly what the young man was thinking. “My own fault, though. Not everyone ends up like me. I scorched my own nerves trying to be a tough guy. That’s a long story, though.”

Nic arched an eyebrow. “I don’t follow.”

Joe hobbled back over to his desk, idly turning a dusty old trophy with the inscription:

YEI RECORD

15 WORLDS

TEAM GOLDENROD (2570)

“We were the first squad to hit 15 captures under Yellow Expansion. Some other kids blew this clean outta the water even before the turn of the century, mind you. At the time, though, we felt like superstars. It was a lot of hard work to get there. You see, we won a few, lost a couple, won one, and then we were on this awful losing streak like you wouldn’t believe. Loss after loss after loss. We were fixin’ to get canned if we lost just two more planets. Or was it one more? Any rate...” Joe’s eyes wandered around the room as he relocated his train of thought. “Yeah, we were fallin’ apart. Team Goldenrod’s Squad Leader was a hotheaded buffoon. Thought he was the stuff, you know? Thought he could take on every other squad by himself and everyone else was there to play backup.”

Nic answered with a half-smirk and a breath out through his nose, something half-resembling a laugh. “Sounds like a guy I know. I hear being a Squad Leader is tough, though.”

“No excuse,” Joe replied simply, shaking his head. “No excuse. A leader has to take a double portion of blame when his team loses and a half portion of credit when they win. He had to learn that yet. Team Goldenrod, we didn’t stop losing until the Squad Leader pulled his head out of his own hindquarters, so to speak, and figured out what made a good leader. It wasn’t being the best on the squad, earning the right to boss his buddies around. It was about bringing out the best in his squadmates! His team’s performance wasn’t a reflection of him or them, it was a reflection of his leadership. He coulda kept throwing himself at every other squad in the galaxy until the stars burned out, and sure, maybe he’d miraculously win one out of a hundred matches. But we didn’t have a hundred left. It was time to do or die.” Joe smiled, his eyes wandering again. “Well, we ended up doing, in the end.”

Lucky them, Nic thought. “It’s a good thing your Squad Leader figured things out in time, I guess. I’d love to know how he did it.”

“Well, all I had to do was accept the possibility that I was wrong. Everything started to fall into place after that.” Joe chuckled. “What, you think I can’t tell a fellow Squad Leader when I see one, kid? You got bags under the eyes like I used to get, about a decade too soon, I should add.”

Nic felt his shoulders relax for the first time in a long time and he let out a breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding. “I didn’t know it was that obvious.”

“I can tell you’ve been carryin’ some weight on your shoulders, kid. Looks like a losing streak if I ever saw one. How many matches deep are ya now?”

“Well, we just had our first one. We lost.”

“Your first one?” Joe laughed loudly, the wrinkled creases at the edges of his eyes deepening. He clapped a withered old hand on Nic’s back. “Kid, I think you’re gonna do fine.” The elderly man took a while to calm down, and when he did, he took on a tone of dispensing serious advice, his lips making an odd chewing motion for some reason. “When you leave here, I want you to remember what I said. It’s not you or them. It’s how you lead them. Okay?” Nic nodded, though he knew the man’s words weren’t really getting through to him—at least not yet. He was still trapped in his habitual strategies and modes of thinking; those would take time to unlearn. “Take a walk with me over here. I want you to look at two things, all right? Look at your squad. And look at Ducenti. She’s a beaut, ain’t she?”

Nic was reminded again of the fact that they were on a fully terraformed planet for the first time. He was so in his head about their next Wargame match that he neglected to enjoy this detour while it lasted. His squadmates were out in the repair yard, running their fingers through blades of grass pushing up through cracks in the concrete, smelling flowers and weeds. Shanti stood under a tree that was just barely taller than she was and played with its leaves without harming them.

“You know,” said Joe, “this planet, Colony 200, was the very first planet Team Goldenrod ever captured. I was your age when we won it. Yellow Expansion toiled away at it ever since. About a decade ago, I decided to check it out for old time’s sake, see what happened to it all these years later.” Joe smiled. “I loved it so much I decided this’ll be the place that I die.”

Suddenly, Nic felt something hit his scalp. Something small and wet. Then another. It felt like small droplets of water like when he took a shower—and then more came and pelted him and Joe and the other members of Team Scarlet, and he realized it was raining.

It dawned on him that this was the first time he’d felt natural rain in his entire life. Goosebumps prickled his skin.

“You shoulda seen it when I was your age, boy,” Joe told him over the gentle staccato of rainfall. “You woulda never imagined this.” A while passed before he spoke again. “You might find it hard to picture what success looks like for you and your friends. I think you’ll make it, though. It’s like terraforming a planet. Most important ingredient?”

“Time,” Nic guessed.

“Close,” Joe replied. “Patience.” He raised a trembling hand and pointed it at Perri, Maqsud, and Jarek, who were frolicking in the rain. “For yourself and for them. Got it?”

Nic nodded. The old man was starting to make some sense to him now. “You never told me how you got your, um... Your condition, sir.”

“Call me Joe. And I’ll tell ya how I got it... I thought I’d be a tough guy and crank up the pain settings in the sims practicing for our next match. I did it over and over again. All it took was about a year of me being a hothead and the damage was done. Nervous system can only bend so much before it breaks, ya know? Course, it’s a lot worse now than when I first retired, but you don’t mess around with that kinda stuff. Understand?”

Nic swallowed hard. Good to know.

***

The repair was finished not long after it started raining outside. The technicians explained to Nic that their check valve was working just fine and it must have been an error on the part of RTIFIS, but no harm was done. The shop’s diagnostic was free, as Joe promised all customers, so the whole ordeal only cost the five teens a few hours of their time.

Nic and Perri both insisted on paying some credits to the shop as a token of thanks, but the technicians—Joe especially—adamantly refused. They said it was worth it just to shoot the breeze. To see the looks on their faces the first time they felt rain.

“If you really want to part with some credits that bad,” Joe chuckled, “pop over to the little convenience store I run next door. Candies, soft drinks—I’ll bet there’s plenty of stuff you don’t have in your ration crates, huh?”

“I’m in!” Jarek exclaimed. He started running after his squadmates but about-faced suddenly to check on Nic. “You comin’?”

Nic shook his head. “I’m okay. You guys get something good and meet me on the Corvette when you’re ready.” Jarek nodded once and obliged.

After Nic shook Joe’s hand one last time and bid everyone at the shop farewell, he boarded Team Scarlet’s Class I Pioneer Corvette alone. It was painfully quiet and empty inside without his squadmates. His first instinct was to enter the Simnasium and drill Wargame until Jarek or Perri alerted him that takeoff was about to commence. He suppressed this instinct.

“RTIFIS,” said Nic.

the AI replied pleasantly.

“Repairs are all done. Turns out they weren’t even necessary. There was never a problem with the water filter’s check valve.”

“It was no error. The whole repair was a ruse. You sent us to Ducenti on purpose. Tell me why.”

“No. I’m not angry. I’m grateful. But I’m also curious.”

Nic smiled. “Well played, RTIFIS. Well played.”