“Well, you guys know me,” Nic announced to the group. “Questions are not my strong suit.”

“You’re more of a shoot first, ask forgiveness later kind of guy,” Perri quipped. “I can get behind that.”

“Do y’all think we could, um, maybe get this show on the road?” said Jarek, his proxybot scratching the back of its head idly. “Sorry. I just really don’t wanna be out here when the sun goes down. I’m gettin’ the heebie-jeebies already...”

This far inland, there was nothing to see in all directions but gravel, jagged rocks, slabs of stone weathered by precipitation and wind, and a vast gray sky teeming with clouds that could threaten rain at any minute... or worse.

All five members of Team Scarlet stood on the moist, windswept surface of Planet Nereus—or, rather, their proxybots did. They were still safe, warm, and secure in the Simnasium aboard their Corvette. Their robotic avatars stood in a circle around a fallen repairbot, which would be able to tell them the fate and whereabouts of Red Terraforming’s exploratory probe that had gone MIA, the whole reason for their little interstellar road trip. Nic was eager for the interrogation to begin. He just wasn’t a good interrogator.

“Ask it...” Perri was about to relay the question when she apparently thought better of it, striding over and bending down to talk to the thing herself. Her metallic feet rattled loose stones with each step she took. “Repairbot, what are you doing all the way out here?”

{I am Repairbot Series XV, here to answer any diagnostic or repair questions you may have for me.}

“What?” Perri exchanged an expressionless look with Nic through their plan proxybot visors. “Okay, never mind how you got here. Can you just tell us what happened to the probe?”

{It sounds like you need help with a probe. How may I be of assistance?}

“This thing is no RTIFIS, that’s for sure,” Nic scoffed. “No offense, RTIFIS.”

said the more familiar AI.

“Erm, repairbot,” Maqsud tried, “could you please display repair records for the Red Terraforming probe to which you were assigned?”

{Error: protocol not found. Your question is outsi—Your question is outside the scope of my abilities-s, or I may need to dow-download an update.}

Max threw up his hands. “Well, that begins to explain things. Where does one turn when a repairbot needs fixing?!”

“Just tell us where the Red Terraforming probe is,” Nic commanded. Silence. “The probe! Show probe location!”

{It sounds like you need help with a pro-pr—side the scope of my abilities. How may I be of assistance?}

“Y’all remember that repair shop RTIFIS sent us to back on Ducenti?” Jarek asked, chuckling. “Just sayin’, I see now how they stay in business. No offense, repairbot.” It didn’t respond. “This thing’s lookin’ more and more like a dead end by the minute. What next? Do we move on? I mean, it can’t even answer simple questions.”

“[Maybe it can,]” Shanti offered timidly through her thought-to-speech link. The rest of Team Scarlet waited silently for her next words. “[Maybe we need to ask questions that it can understand.]” Scarlet 5 cautiously approached the repairbot still in Nic’s hands. A quiet beat passed; Nic guessed she was either gathering the courage, or the right words, to speak. “[What was the last repair you completed?]”

{Approximately 20 standard hours ago I repai—20 standard hours ago I repaired damaged landing gear. Would you like the par-par-part number? Part number: P6129961735804-LG11-4.} At this revelation, Jarek ran for the trunk of the Centaur where Nic had stashed the recovered landing gear from earlier.

“Good call, Jarek,” said Nic. “I think we’re finally getting somewhere.”

“[That was a different part,]” Shanti said with all the confidence that a thought-to-speech program could convey.

“I appreciate your input, Shanti, but let’s hear what the repairbot has to say first.”

“No, she’s right,” Perri agreed. “The other part, I remember it ended in 16. RTIFIS, can you run that part number by us again? Compare?”

RECOVERED : P44681515-LG16 REPAIRBOT RECORD : P6129961735804-LG11-4

“If I didn’t know any better,” Perri speculated, “I’d say the repairbot is talking about a Corvette. I don’t know much about freighters or big ships like that, but this is a long part number for a probe.”

“That’s not possible, though,” Nic replied. “Ours is the first Corvette that’s ever touched down on this planet. Red Terraforming hasn’t even secured the right to compete in a Wargame for Nereus yet.”

“Well, I know that, Nic, but that’s still what it sounds like. Doesn’t it, RTIFIS?”

“So,” Maqsud chuckled, tapping his robotic avatar’s cranium in thought, “let’s walk this through logically, shall we? The repairbot can’t point us to the probe. It’s been damaged. Its last repair record was for a Corvette, which has nothing to do with the part we actually did find—that part belongs to our missing probe. What explanation does that leave us? Are we not alone on Nereus—does this probe not belong to Red Terraforming? Or is someone playing a prank on us?”

“Worse than a prank,” said Nic, “but in that same arena. I’m thinking it was a sabotage.”

“Sabotage?”

Nic nodded. “Sabotage.”

“I love that word, sabotage. There’s almost a poetry to it. There will never be another language in the galaxy quite like French, will there?”

“Staying on topic,” Nic went on, “if another company’s galactic survey spotted Nereus and they wanted to cash in just like Red Terraforming, then they’d have every reason to sabotage our probe and its repairbot. They could have fed the repairbot false data or even prevented it from writing new data. It could be talking about a repair it made weeks ago, for all we know. Hey, it even could have detached the probe’s landing gear, dropped it off where we found it, and been doing donuts next to this stream until it fell over.”

“Videos don’t lie,” Jarek said, rejoining the group after returning the old part to the Centaur’s trunk. “All we have to do is take a look at what it saw. RTIFIS, you’d be able to spot a fake, right? Something edited?”

“I don’t like the idea of our Corvette being dead in the water if something happens to it while we’re gone,” said Perri, the hesitation palpable in her voice. “Or worse, if something happens to our repairbot, we’ll be stranded on the outskirts of human space with no way home... Is there another option?”

Perri shook her head. “I like that idea even less. Nic?”

“Send a drone with our repairbot to recover this one, RTIFIS,” said Scarlet 1, later adding, “please.”

“I feel like I’m understanding less and less about what happened to this damn probe the more clues we find,” Nic muttered, setting the repairbot down on comparatively drier land next to the stream where they’d found it. There was a restlessness percolating inside him. On the surface, he chalked it up to his frustration with the length of this mission, which was shaping up to be longer than any Wargame they’d ever played.

Deep down, though, he knew it was something more. He missed the competition of Wargame. He missed the gunplay. The explosions. The safe, simulated, harmless act of shooting at an enemy. Killing them. Dying, even. And being reborn to do it all over again.

Maybe I’m not a born winner like my mother said, he thought. Maybe I’m a born fighter.

“What now, Squad Leader?” Jarek piped up.

“The only way to know for sure what happened,” said Nic, “is to track down the probe itself. It’s what we came here to do. We’re still no closer to finding this thing than when we started!”

“That’s not entirely true,” Max countered. “We’ve recovered two pieces already. We’re on the right track. It’s just that the track may well end several hundred kilometers that way.”

“Then we’re burning daylight. We don’t even know how long a day is on this planet. Team Scarlet, let’s get back on the road.” Nic, Shanti, Jarek, and Maqsud all piled back into the four-seater Centaur while Perri climbed back into the cockpit of her Harpy and took off. “And cross your fingers that if some other company did have the gall to sabotage ours, that we get to face them in the Wargame for Planet Nereus.”

The sooner the better.