>>>RETREAT! >>>RETREAT! >>>RETREAT!

Nic was barely aware of the burning red messages on his HUD. They faded into obscurity, nothing but visual noise that his eyes bored straight through. His gaze focused on the enemy. The threat that needed to be neutralized. It was his only hope for victory now—and a Pyrrhic one at that.

said RTIFIS.

The AI’s voice droned on in a repeating message. It, too, faded from his attention, tucked beneath more pressing sounds like the roar of his Submachine Gun and the frenzied noises the aliens made as he mowed them down.

“Reloading SMG,” Nic called out, and in the time it took to say the words, he was emptying a fresh clip into a pair of alien squads. He took out the armless ones first, the ones with the quills lining their heads and backs—they seemed to be adept snipers. Hard to hit with how skinny they were, but easy to kill. The gray ones took more bullets before they hit the ground.

By the time those four were eliminated, more of the stubby-legged, scaly aliens that ran on their forelegs were charging straight at him. He gunned them down as easily as the others; they were moving targets, but they were wide, and Nic was a good shot when he had to be.

Something grabbed his shoulder.

On reflex, he elbowed it. Hard.

Felt a stubborn metallic thud. Heard the whisper of something glassy cracking.

It was Jarek. Nic had just fractured his visor.

“Jarek,” he breathed. His heart nearly stopped—then he saw that the protective visor of his friend’s helmet hadn’t broken completely and was only damaged. It was enough to snap him out of his rampage for the moment.

“We gotta go, man,” Jarek told him forgivingly. “Come on.”

“No,” Nic replied, “I’m not done. I’m not—!” The discussion was over when Jarek and Maqsud each grabbed one of his arms, dragging him from the battlefield. “Let go! I said let go! I’m Squad Leader and I am ordering you to let go of me now!” They didn’t respond to his demands or threats, quietly removing him to a safe enough distance that his AI-guided vac-armor autopilot could engage.

Nic’s vac-armor suddenly jostled him around violently as the suit took off running at superhuman speeds. He feared he’d break his bones during transit, but then his body suddenly stabilized and he saw a message on his HUD.

[PROTOTYPE REACTIVE IMPACT FOAM RECALIBRATING]

Now he could barely feel the movement at all, his limbs waving gracefully in the skintight under-suit while his vac-armor ran like the wind for the Corvette. “Stop!” Nic yelled into his helmet. “RTIFIS, let me go! Override retreat!”

A drone rocketed by overhead.

“You don’t understand!” he shouted, his voice cracking. Through his HUD, he could see that he and the other surviving members of Team Scarlet were sprinting past three members of Team Xanthic, two of whom crouched next to a wounded third. He couldn’t see Shanti. “We can’t go yet! We can’t... We can’t just leave her here. Stop. Stop! You’re just abandoning her!”

The drone Nic had just heard appeared in the corner of his HUD, beelining for the Scarlet Corvette.

The journey back to their ship dragged on for what felt like hours, the seconds ticking past like minutes as Nic anxiously checked the time on his HUD over and over again. He found himself thinking of his last year at Paradigm Preparatory Institute, especially the day of his Final Exam. He’d fought so hard to be here now. To see what he’d seen today. He found himself wishing that he was scrubbing the filters of atmosphere pumps, even if it made him sweat so much that his eyes burned with the salt of it and he couldn’t see straight. Or working a construction job that left him sleeping alone in an ice-cold rover overnight in the pitch dark of some planet with a few thousand residents.

Even the Wargames didn’t seem so bad anymore. At least the pain was over when he pulled off his suit. Now he’d likely never feel simulated pain ever again, as such a simulation would be redundant.

The sight of their Corvette was the sight of salvation, albeit temporary.

Nic’s vac-armor hurled itself into the cold storage container with a weighty thump. The others joined him milliseconds later, thump-thump-thump—only three now. “You said—” Nic began, but then his vac-armor ejected him from cold storage into a new chamber, one that was not here the last time he’d been on the ship. RTIFIS must have printed and assembled it in their absence. It was a glass box with several hoses of varying sizes and mechanical arms inside with different attachments.

Water. Some kind of soap. A harsh-smelling chemical, the kind Nic hadn’t smelled since his days on Ayrus, but the name escaped him. Then a cold, white, frothing substance that clung to his skin and had to be scrubbed off by a spinning circular brush. Nic remembered the sight of old men buffing Corvettes by hand with similar devices on Ducenti, a lifetime ago.

Towels were waiting for them outside the decontamination chamber. No one used them. Perri grabbed hers and wrapped it over her shoulders like a shawl, but that was it.

Finally, the fifth suit of vac-armor was deposited in cold storage. No decontamination was necessary; it would remain there, along with the four other suits from today, as well as the suit Nic was wearing when he was abducted. Six lifeless sets of armor.

said RTIFIS. Before they’d even left the cargo hold, the ship shuddered and listed with the G-forces of takeoff. Nic felt like he was climbing a mountain that inclined in real time.

He saw to it that each of his three squadmates—only three now—made it to the control room at the nose of the ship and into their seats. He personally buckled Perri into her seat, and by that point, Jarek had already buckled himself, but Nic checked his harness by hand to ensure a snug fit. The ship lurched with increased speed and Maqsud took a tumble, the last straggler to enter the control room—but now the tilt of the Corvette threatened to throw him for a great fall.

Nic reached out his hand and grabbed Max’s so hard that he heard knuckles crack. He wasn’t sure whose they were. There was a look of fresh panic in Max’s eyes as Nic helped him into his seat, the room tilting at a near 45-degree angle now. “I’ve got you, brother,” Nic breathed as he fastened Maqsud’s harness.

Nic did as he was told, climbing effortfully into the frontmost chair. By that point, the intensifying G-forces plastered him to his seat. It was suddenly much harder to breathe. He summoned all the strength in his arms to finish fastening his belt. Then they both fell limply at his sides and he felt the pull of acceleration on his flesh, the quivering of his skin being pulled backward from the sudden acceleration. His vision dimmed.

“...clear for Devi drive activation. Repeat, clear for immediate evac.” The voice of the Vice Chair again.

When Nic regained clarity, their ship was entering the spacetime bulge of faster-than-light travel. RTIFIS gave them the clearance to unbuckle their harnesses and move about the Corvette.

Nic remained sitting in his seat, harness buckled, staring straight ahead, for almost an hour before he moved.

***

No one said anything. Not for a long time. Not at all.

Nic’s body went through the motions of lying down on the couch, although he didn’t sleep. The other three moved about the frontal portion of the ship—only three of them now, he noted each time he thought of them. The time for him to lead with the façade of confidence in the face of adversity was long gone, all pretenses stripped away. At least for now, Nic and his subordinates were all equal, all survivors of the same event that hadn’t spared all of their peers.

In his heart, Nic damned Red Terraforming for sending them to Planet Nereus in the first place. All in the name of chasing down a lead on big revenue. All in the name of beating someone else to the punch and putting their scarlet hand on the treasure to claim it. All in the name of Finders, Keepers.

He wondered what had happened to Team Obsidian. They’d arrived before any of the three squads that did battle on Nereus. Maybe he’d never learn what happened to them—maybe no one would. Maybe Obsidian had made the wrong moves and been slaughtered by the aliens as well, caught unprepared. Maybe they were still out there somewhere.

He wondered how many Xanthic and Tyrian players survived. In his mind, he saw the spike go through the helmet of one of his opponents. Then he saw the one that pierced Shanti’s neck. The images played back-to-back in his head like the comparison images the aliens had displayed on their ship, helmet, then Shanti, back, then forth, ad nauseam.

His subconscious fixated on the memory in the same way that his tongue would poke at a toothache. It solved nothing, and it hurt each time, but there was an instinct to keep doing it anyway that he couldn’t explain.

Perri was the first one to speak directly to him—not at him, not going through the motions in the way they all had been for what must have been days into their journey, but to him. “One day, this will be something that happened in our past.” She paused and let her words settle over him. She put her hand on his. “It feels impossible, and world-shattering, and it is... but it won’t be forever. I promise, we’re going to look back on this as a dark time, but we’re going to be doing just that, looking back. We’ll be living in another time then, another place. What happened was...” She couldn’t find the right words in the moment. “It was impossible. But it’s already in the past, even if it’s the recent past. I know it doesn’t feel like it yet, but... it’s over.”

Nic looked into her eyes, then through them, through the back of her head and off at the wall behind her. It was like he was afraid to look directly at her and would rather look at something imaginary off in the distance. “Thank you, Perri, but we need to accept that that’s not true.”

Her brow furrowed. “What do you mean? How could it not be true? Do you think it’s going to feel like this forever? Because if that’s the case, I don’t think I’d... I...” Her voice trailed off, deflated, wounded. She cast her gaze at the floor.

Nic looked out the front viewscreen at the warped bubble depicting their destination, a journey that would take centuries for a photon to complete. He thought of his first time aboard this very Corvette that carried him to an uncertain future. How terrified he was at first. How jealous he was now of his younger self, to have dealt with trials and tribulations that now seemed so banal, so manageable. He feared that his future self was already looking back with jealousy on his present self.

“How we feel is irrelevant,” he said to her. “It’s not over.” Nic stared out the front viewscreen and heaved a deep, weary sigh that belied his years. “We’ll never look back on what happened as the end of anything but our peace, and the beginning of something terrible. The beginning of a game that we might play for the rest of our lives. I don’t know if there will be any winners.” He looked solemnly in the direction of Jarek and Maqsud. His eyes caught the cargo hold door. “But I know that we’ll have no choice but to play.”