The terror of his own impending death was too much for Nic to bear.

Wind rushed past him in a constant roar that would have been deafening if not for the insulation of his vac-armor. He could still barely hear it over the blaring alarms in his helmet.

The same message flashed on his HUD in burning red light:

>>>EMERGENCY! >>>11.1KM FREEFALL – CORRECT COURSE!

A deep, antique klaxon-style tone assaulted his ears once every three seconds or so. This was to remind him he was on course to collide with Planet Nereus in just a couple of minutes. The crash would surely kill him. Meanwhile, a higher-pitched ding-ding-dinging indicated his vital signs, which were now going haywire thanks to a steady stream of adrenaline and hyperventilation.

He must have already fallen at least a few kilometers when he passed out.

***

He woke up when he felt the impact.

“No!” he yelled, his body tensing all at once. One second, he was fast asleep, and in the next, he was wide awake and bracing for unimaginable pain or the sensation of dying. He didn’t know what it would feel like to die... but this wasn’t it.

He was still falling.

It may have been a dream, a hypnic jerk. He got those a lot during his first nights aboard the Corvette after leaving Planet Ayrus behind. This one felt strangely vivid. Adrenaline, he thought. I have to find a way to slow down!

He instinctively made himself parallel with the ground, holding out all four limbs to increase air resistance. Then it hit him again.

Thump.

He rotated wildly on a horizontal axis, spinning like a sideways ballerina in a pirouette. His HUD’s readings struggled to adjust in real time and reminded him of an old-school magnetic compass or GPS. Once his rotational momentum slowed down, he was able to get a good look at what hit him.

It was approaching again.

Thump.

This time when it rammed into him, he studied its shape and color. It was practically invisible except for a few flashes of a brownish blur. From what he could piece together, it looked like it had a squid’s head, sharp at the tip and slightly bulbous, with many tentacles or tendrils trailing behind it. Something flying. Something alien.

“Stop!” Nic shouted over the ambient noise. Again, there was no telling if it would respond, if it could hear him, understand him, or care, but he had to try something. “Stop attacking me!”

One last time, it tackled him in midair—this time from underneath. The vac-armor provided limited tactile sensations, not quite like the sophisticated one-for-one echoes of a SimSuit, but he could still feel that something was moving across his body.

Tendrils. It was crawling on him.

The howl of wind slowed, quieted. Nic’s body jolted suddenly—another gasp of breath, then calm.

ALERT! CORRECT COURSE – PLEASE RETURN TO CORVETTE.

“Nic!” Perri yelled. “Nic, can you hear me?”

“He’s back online,” said Jarek. “Nic, where are you? Are you hurt? What’s goin’ on, brother?”

Max interjected next. “Nic, if you’re unable to communicate vocally, just offer some signal that you’re still alive—even a click consonant would suffice!”

“Guys,” said Nic. Everyone competed to ask him questions—he even heard Shanti’s thought-to-speech voice speak once under the chaos. Nic looked up, saw a hideous, brownish-yellow, bulbous bag of air hovering over his head, dangling him by its tendrils. Its sack-like head—if indeed that was its head—shuddered with what seemed to be the intake of air, hissing it out a moment later.

It saved me, Nic thought. It’s like a... living... balloon. A balloon-jellyfish-thing.

“What’s goin’ on with your vac-armor, man? Must be on the fritz. It’s showin’ you’re three klicks up in the air!”

Nic took some deep breaths. It was a conscious choice he made not to pass out again, this time from sheer relief. “It’s a long story. I’ll explain when I land.”

A few minutes of slow, peaceful falling later, Nic’s vac-armor boots were on the ground again. The tendrils of the strange floating creature instantly untangled from around his shoulders and it sucked in a huge gulp of air through an unseen intake, hissing and climbing rapidly into the sky toward the invisible craft overhead. It disappeared into the night.

said RTIFIS.

The vac-armor now moved on a preprogrammed route back to the Corvette, the limbs jerking suddenly in precise motions. It was jarring for Nic at first, but nothing compared to what he’d just experienced, so he let it happen. It wasn’t as if he had a choice in the matter regardless.

RTIFIS explained once Nic entered the Corvette. His suit stomped straight into a special side door in the rear cargo hold. A sterile white room waited for him; he was forcefully ejected from the suit of armor, rolling onto the cold, corrugated metal floor of the hold. The cold storage doors slammed shut the instant he was clear. He heard a frosty hissing sound.

The interior cargo hold door opened and he heard the bounding steps of Team Scarlet entering. Perri ran up and embraced him, partially helping him back to his feet. “Glad you’re okay,” she said with strange nonchalance when she broke away from the hug. Then she made her way to the back of the squad, averting her gaze.

“You made it back in one piece,” Jarek said when he hugged Nic. “We didn’t leave you out there, man. RTIFIS walked us back. It was them, wasn’t it?”

“RTIFIS, uh... Sorry, I don’t follow,” said Nic, his thoughts scattered. “Oh! Oh, right, RTIFIS. Yeah, me too...” He held his eyelids open wide against their instinct to close. His whole body could have collapsed in that moment, his exhaustion was so bone-deep.

“Autonomous piloting,” Maqsud contributed. “We waited for you by the Corvette, and when you didn’t return, we were going to set out looking for you. Our AI custodian felt it was safer to compel us into the ship.”

“I, uh...” said Nic, still not absorbing the information. “I saw them.”

“I knew it!” Jarek exclaimed.

“What did you see, Nic?” Max asked.

RTIFIS announced.

So, it was still functional while I was up there, Nic thought. At least somewhat. Good. WorldGov needs to see what we’re dealing with here.

“Can we see it?” Jarek asked. “When it’s ready, I mean?”

“I was aboard their ship,” Nic answered.

“They?” Perri asked, intrigued. “You saw more than one? What were they like? Peaceful? Are you hurt? Did they say anything?”

A loopy, grateful smile spread across Nic’s face. “I think we’re gonna want to be sitting down for this one.”

***

“They must be peaceful then,” said Jarek. “Why else would they have, uh, ya know, given you that parachute so to speak? They wanted you to live! They musta just been checkin’ you out or somethin’, like an inspection.”

“Or it could have been a formality,” Max countered cynically. “They don’t want to kill one of us and risk starting a conflict of some sort. If we would even be on remotely equal footing technologically... Perhaps it’s a matter of convenience for them. Or perhaps they don’t have enough intel just yet.”

“[Too soon,]” Shanti’s speech software said simply.

“Well put, Shanti. It’s far too soon for either side to draw any definitive conclusions.”

“Well, how did they make you feel?” Perri asked. “We don’t have much hard data yet. But what kind of vibe did you get from them? Good? Bad? Were they just curious about you, do you think?”

“I... I don’t know.” Nic shrugged. “I couldn’t tell if they wanted to hurt me or not. I couldn’t tell what they wanted.” He shook his head. “It didn’t feel like a friendly encounter to me, but I could be wrong. Somehow, they made sure I didn’t die at least, so... that’s a plus.”

Team Scarlet stayed up for hours discussing what happened to Nic before they received official word on his HUD recording. There wasn’t even a message from Hansen Dyne this time—simply a written directive for all of Team Scarlet to watch the footage. Even though Nic had described what he’d seen in great detail, his squadmates reacted with shock, bewilderment, and a healthy dose of fear to what they saw on the living room screen. They watched it again and again, enraptured, pausing and replaying certain moments throughout. It captivated them for several hours past that.

The Nereus night marched on outside their Corvette. Nic lost track of the time. He couldn’t remember how long they’d been sitting in the living room, or how long they’d all been awake. The free-for-all, he remembered. We all got some sleep before that. It was a passing thought.

One hour bled into the next. They passionately discussed the information they could gather about xenobiology, debated whether the two life forms were different species—an interplanetary alliance of some kind—or simply different sexes, genders, or other phenotypic expressions of the same alien race. They bandied philosophical ideas back and forth, wondered what WorldGov’s next step would be. They cooked meals together as the time kept on marching and they were kept aloft by the sheer life-changing energy of the situation they found themselves in now.

Nic wasn’t sure what time he fell asleep, or how long he’d been out. Everything was one big blur. He woke up with a droplet of cold drool on his lower lip and the feeling of gunk in his eyes.

Perri, he thought. When he awoke, he realized he’d fallen asleep on her shoulder. He felt his face flush. It should have been her falling asleep on me, if anything. Not that it should have been anything... But it feels backwards. I probably creeped her out. Unless I can get up without her noticing...

He sat up on the couch. Max was asleep in a chair, his mouth hanging open limply in sleep. Jarek was sprawled out on the living room table. Shanti was nowhere to be seen—until Nic glanced at Bedroom 5 and noticed the slight bulge under the covers. He felt relieved to see all four of his squadmates accounted for, and he scooted over on the couch slightly so as not to wake Perri.

“Hm?” she said, turning abruptly to look at him. “Oh... Just waking up?” Suddenly her eyes looked much sleepier and she stretched, yawning. “Me, too. How long were we out?”

There was a tingle at the back of Nic’s neck. One thing at a time, he thought.

Before he could dwell on it any longer, a loud tone sounded in the living room. Jarek and Max lurched awake as well. Shanti rose from her bed and rejoined the group.

said RTIFIS.

***

Nic and the others stood outside on the rocky, mud-slicked terrain at the central point between all three Corvettes, just as they’d been instructed. The bright sun crept up from beneath the horizon of Nereus, casting an orange-pinkish glow across the sky. There was a light breeze. The arrival was due to happen any minute now.

“Here it comes,” Nic breathed. “Get ready.”

Team Scarlet stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the other two squads from the Team Free-for-All match. Scarlet was on the left, Xanthic on the right, with Tyrian in the middle. They stood solemnly in a row. Despite Maqsud’s protests, each of them came equipped with a standard loadout of weaponry: one Submachine Gun, one Pistol, and two Fragmentation Grenades.

Just as Hansen Dyne and Clotilde had jointly explained in the last beacon, WorldGov intel suggested that first contact would be initiated at sunrise. How, or why, they knew that, Nic could only speculate—but it made sense somehow. And now that he saw the ripples of some sort of camouflage receding from an impossibly huge shape in the sky, he knew that their intel was correct.

As the colossal white seed descended from the broken dawn, it rotated slowly on its axis. The air beneath it vibrated; it called to Nic’s mind a sim he’d played once set in an Earth desert with an old-fashioned blacktop road, where the heat would play tricks on the light. Most unsettling of all was the sound it made—or general lack thereof.

Through Nic’s vac-armor, he could only pick out two distinct noises: a soft, faint, humming drone like someone wailing quietly in the throes of grief. He’d heard that on the day his mother left him—from more than one of the other parents herded aboard the transport ship. This first wailing noise was constant but quiet. The second noise was intermittent, and happened at irregular intervals. It was a cross between distant thunder—or perhaps more like the report of a Sniper Rifle—and the noise of a great, thick tree cracking in half, a fibrous snapping sound. Each instance of the second noise was unique; no two sounded exactly alike.

Nic had no idea what sort of otherworldly technology made these sounds, or why, but they were unnerving to hear. Alien in every sense of the word.

Minutes later, one final crack of thunder marked its landing. The craft was taller than any building Nic had ever seen. On closer examination, he realized that it dwarfed the egg-shaped craft he’d seen outlined in the sky on his ascent—those were small enough to fit inside this titanic vessel. He swallowed hard.

“Wait right where you are,” said an unfamiliar human voice in Nic’s HUD. “This is Vice Chair Colin Crusoe.” WorldGov, Nic realized with a gasp. “You are now being broadcast on tightly restricted channels on a need-to-know basis. You will be given exact instructions on how to proceed. Do you understand?” Nic hesitated. “Scarlet 1, do you understand, yes or no?”

He’s talking to me. “Yes, sir. I understand.”

“Good. I’ve already cleared the other two squad leaders. Your team is to stand still and shut up. We’re going to let them make the first move.”

Just then, Nic could see a small seam splitting open on the hard exterior of the craft, an oval shape nearly a hundred meters high.

First contact was about to begin.