Nic thought the explosion was simulated at first.

He saw it before he heard it, a little white-yellow flicker in the corner of his HUD. Then came the curt, crunching boom as sound caught up with light. Fireworks, was his first instinct. Whether real or just an overlay on his HUD, he thought it was the beginning of an aerial lightshow—a celebration of Team Scarlet’s grueling combat and ultimate victory over not one but two challengers.

“I did it!” Nic exclaimed. He looked at his squadmates. “We... We did it, guys! We won!” Every last member of Team Tyrian was on the ground now. Max and Shanti hopped off the platform as well, and Perri started to follow.

“Is that it?” Jarek asked. “Where’s the Team Scarlet: Victory thing?”

said RTIFIS. The AI’s tone was neither celebratory nor consolatory.

“Please announce the winner, RTIFIS,” said Nic. “I’m not leaving this spot until you do. Not with what’s on the line here.”

Just then, it started to rain.

Not water. Metal.

Dozens of weapons, grenades, and fragments of proxybots poured from the sky, scattering across the landscape. Nic’s HUD outlined each and every piece to help him see more clearly in the dark, his vision already light- and color-adjusted. Then the smoking wreckage of a drone—or at least half of one—came down about a hundred meters from the Hill, digging a muddy trench into the surface of Nereus. No one said anything.

Jarek and Perri were already leading Nic back toward the Corvette, each of them grabbing him by one of his wrists. Team Tyrian was long gone back to their Corvette. Shanti and Maqsud led the way to the Scarlet ship, and all the while, Nic couldn’t help but feel that something was being stolen from him for the second time in his life.

“The lights... Was it them? Meteors, maybe?” Jarek asked as they ran.

Maqsud shook his head. “I’ve never seen meteors that move quite like that, Jarek.”

“I don’t know why everyone is making a big deal of this,” said Nic, practically on the verge of angry tears. “They would tell us if something was seriously wrong! Red Terraforming. The other companies—they’d say something. They’re watching in real time through the FTLCom link. If something was really going on—”

“Nic, a drone full of weapons and explosives just fell out of the sky,” Perri cut him off. “Something is going on. Let’s just get inside and figure this out, okay?”

Shanti was the first one who arrived outside the Corvette, activating the door, but she waited for everyone else to step into the airlock before she joined them last. The outer airlock shut and the inner door slid open. Nic stomped to the back of the ship to remove his vac-armor with the rest of his squadmates. He was so angry he half-believed he was breathing out steam with each exhale.

A few minutes later, they were all gathered in the ship’s living room. Now that they were safely within its walls, surrounded by several layers of astrosteel in the ship’s hull, Nic knew they were safe from any outside dangers. That included falling space debris as well as any weapons Team Obsidian may have commandeered. Even highly destructive rockets or the Medusa tank’s railgun cannon could do nothing to puncture this much protection.

Nic scoffed. He’d been pacing back and forth between the living room and the door to the control room. “So that’s it, then. Team Obsidian finally decides to make an appearance with minutes to spare. If they can’t have Nereus, no one can. I’d call them sore losers, but they didn’t even play!”

Maqsud answered him, “Nic, I know that was my initial hypothesis, and now you seem to have come round to it, but we’re well past that now. Are you afraid to admit what’s really happening here?”

“I don’t know what else it could possibly be. I mean, I guess terrorists. I don’t know how they’d even find this planet. Maybe a rogue RTIFIS instance. Malfunction of some kind. Or maybe Jarek was right and it’s just falling space debris. It happens.”

“RTIFIS explicitly denied us the Biomarker—”

“Biomarker readings, yeah, I knew you were gonna say that. Please, do not panic everybody with insane theories like that.” The hairs on the back of his neck stood up; a chill worked its way through his body.

“Is it insane, Nic? Signs of alien life, past or present, have been confirmed on this planet. We are quite literally standing on an alien planet right now. What right have we to fight our petty little war for money, for the right to tear up this land and build on it when we don’t even know what, or who, has been here before us?”

“Max, you’re my friend just like everyone else on this squad, but I am telling you to stop. Talking. Now.”

Now it was Maqsud’s turn to scoff. He stood up from the couch. “You’re hopeless, Nic. Truly, you are. You’re lucky you don’t have any blood on your hands tonight, refusing to dismiss your own squad, your own friends, when the—”

“Max,” Perri said gently. There wasn’t a hint of anger in her voice. It was calm, rational. Peacemaking. She shook her head when he looked at her.

With that, Maqsud stormed off to his room.

“We were in vac-armor the whole time,” said Nic. “And it’s not like I was holding everybody up because I felt like it. I didn’t want us to lose out on the match of our lives over one freak accident! This is a once in a lifetime chance and he...” He shook his head. “I don’t know why he’s got to be so dramatic about everything.”

“Dude can be kinda intense at times,” said Jarek, “but don’t you think he might have a point? I mean, Nic... what if that is what’s happening?”

Nic was too afraid to give that thought any headspace. He worried that acknowledging it, even in his own mind, would lend some kind of credence to it and somehow magically make it real. He couldn’t allow that to happen. Instead, he just dismissed it again with another confident shake of his head.

“Think about it logically, Jarek,” he said, trying equally hard to convince himself as to convince his friend. “The chances of us finding some kind of microbes on a planet like this one are pretty high. There have been, what... four squads on Nereus already. Twenty people. We scoured a pretty good area looking for Red Terraforming’s probe. There’s an FTLCom link. There are drones that fly around and pick up after every Wargame. We’re not gonna be the first ones to discover some advanced alien species like that.”

“Maybe we weren’t,” Perri said gravely.

Scarlet 1 shrugged. “I... I don’t know what you mean by that.”

“What if that’s what happened to Team Obsidian?”

A long stretch of silence elapsed. The Corvette’s water filtration system whispered in the walls.

Maqsud bolted back out of his room to rejoin them.

Nic’s first thought was that it had something to do with the results of the Wargame match. But the more time passed, the more he was sure that Hansen Dyne didn’t come bearing good news. “Okay, RTIFIS. Play it."