“I don’t understand,” said Nic. “This isn’t what I wanted. You guys have to understand—”

“Of course we do, Nic,” Perri said, putting a hand on his shoulder. “Of course we do. No one would wish this on anyone.”

“RTIFIS, confirm the scan one more time, please?” Jarek asked.

Nic forced a deep breath in and out of his lungs, suddenly aware of the SimSuit snug against his body, a prison. “So, that’s it, then. Every member of Team Obsidian is dead.”

Not long after their encounter with the five autonomous black proxybots outside the cave, Team Scarlet located their parked Corvette. It had all proxybot modules still attached, just like Scarlet’s Corvette when it landed on Nereus, and they’d expected to find all five members of the rogue Team Obsidian inside. Now it seemed that Team Obsidian had met with some unfortunate fate. Nic looked up at the starship, at the gleaming, silvery letters of PIONEER embossed on the side, the manufacturer of all interstellar spacecraft, and shook his head with pity. Pity and regret.

I wanted a fight, Nic thought. Not this. I didn’t want them actually dead. Maybe this is a wake-up call to get my priorities in order.

“RTIFIS,” he said, “I’d like permission to board the Corvette and look for them. Find out what happened. Black Planet Engineering, and Team Obsidian’s friends, family, if they had any... they deserve to know what happened. We can record evidence on our HUDs to report to WorldGov.”

“You think that’s a safe idea?” Jarek asked. “What if what killed them is still in there? Toxic gas leak, hull rupture—could be anything.”

“Jarek, we’re not really here, remember?” Perri reminded him. “We’re all still in the Simnasium. We might as well be piloting rovers with a handheld controller like the old Martian colonists.”

Jarek’s proxybot slapped the side of its head in realization. “Oh. Right. Man, I keep forgettin’, too, Nic. Well then, I guess I’m game.”

their AI assistant answered them. Team Scarlet waited in silence for a few seconds.

“Weapons down, Team Scarlet,” Nic told his squad, and everyone obliged. “Our recovery operation just added a fact-finding mission side quest. Look for clues as to what happened.” He paused, a sudden wave of nausea creeping its way up from the pit of his stomach. “We’ll, uh, see what we can do about recovering the bodies, too. If it comes to that.”

Nic led the way through the airlock. Once the other four members of his squad joined behind him, the outer door of the airlock whirred shut. There was less of that squeaky hiss as they transitioned to the filtered Corvette air, and none of that residual steam; the difference in atmospheric pressure was minimal, so there wasn’t as much to show for it.

“Catalog any clues you might find,” he advised the others, looking around the main floor of the ship as he entered. “Look at them for at least five seconds, center stage in your HUD. That should be enough for anyone who might want to analyze it at Red Terraforming or on Earth.”

“If I were a religious man,” said Maqsud, “I’d pray that we wouldn’t find a great deal of clues, or any at all. I’ve gone my whole life without seeing a dead body yet, and I haven’t the slightest temptation to break that streak.”

Nic swept the living room, the control room, the kitchen and dining area, before making his way back through the main floor. Other than a bit of clutter—the odd piece of food packaging not disposed of, playing cards strewn about the coffee table, and so on—nothing was out of place. It looked like an ordinary living space for five fellow Wargame players.

RTIFIS repeated to them in the background.

Nic made his way back toward the Simnasium. His arm reached halfway to the butt of his Submachine Gun strapped to his back—until he realized his mistake. Don’t even touch that thing in here, he scolded himself. Even if they shoot you, you’re not returning fire on a proxybot. That’s a real person. Get it together, man.

His heart raced as he crossed the threshold into the room... only to find it empty. Five empty spaces where he half-expected to see lifeless bodies slumped in SimSuits. He continued his sweep of the main floor, checking the bedrooms and finding no one in there, either.

“Below deck is clear,” Perri reported, climbing the stairs with Scarlet 5 in tow. “Shanti and I checked. Any signs of them up here?”

“Nothing that I’ve found,” Max answered. “It appears my hypothetical prayers may have been answered. Praise be—or would have been, rather...”

“Nothin’,” Jarek agreed.

“That makes zero sense,” said Nic, tilting his head in deep thought. “The atmosphere is pressurized enough, but there’s no way the gas composition is balanced to support human life. RTIFIS even said so.”

“Where could they have gone, then?” Perri asked. “They’re not above or below deck. We would have spotted... I don’t know...” She shrugged. “...bodies out there if they couldn’t make it more than 10 minutes—I mean, we would have seen something, right?”

Nic got a sudden chill. “You heard the AI. I’ll take point and everyone else follow my lead. Do not touch your weapons... but restrain them if you find them alive. If they’re not dead, they’re criminals. We need to be ready for either.”

Scarlet 1 led the way to the rearmost section of the vessel, opening the cargo hold door manually and stepping through the threshold. The lighting inside was low but not nonexistent; his HUD helpfully outlined solid objects with a faint green highlight, helping him navigate the shadows of ration crates and spare part containers. He did a full sweep of the cargo hold and found nothing.

“I mean, unless they’re hidin’ in one of these boxes,” Jarek sighed, “I don’t think they’re here, either.”

“Good work, RTIFIS,” Maqsud congratulated the AI. “What can you tell us now that you’ve got a peek behind the curtain?”

Perri shrugged again. “So? Does that mean they stranded another five ‘bots out there on the surface?”

“So that’s why they never provided us actual space suits here on the Corvette,” said Maqsud. “Fascinating. I can sleep a little easier now.”

Jarek began pacing a cramped corridor in the cargo hold. “That means all five BPE players are still out there. What are they doin’ so far away from their ship?”

“Making sure Red Terraforming never gets that data,” Nic realized. “Maybe they didn’t just destroy it—they can’t destroy the black box, after all. Maybe they already destroyed the probe as best they could and now they’re disposing of the black box, so Red Terraforming will have nothing to send to WorldGov. BPE will have a major head start on us sending a replacement probe here—maybe they even brought their own instruments to gather their own data. Worst of all, it means we’d lose the one thing we were sent to this planet to find.”

“That means we’d fail the mission.” A pause lingered in the air. “Does that count as a loss on our official record? Then we’ll be back to just one loss away from gettin’ terminated again!”

“Not sure. Can’t risk it either way. Team Scarlet, we have got to find that probe on the double. We have to beat them to it. Let’s go!”