The prior events of Planet Nereus had felt like a dream to Nic. The beacon from Red Terraforming, Inc was a bucket of ice water dumped over his head. Everything that was too mind-boggling to be true became frighteningly real all at once, as if he had awoken from a nightmare only to discover that it was really happening to him. His heart raced and his sweat ran cold.

He wasn’t the only one to have a visible reaction. Perri and Jarek were probably the most well-adjusted of the group; the former pulled up her knees against her chest, rocking idly in her seat on the couch. Jarek indulged his bad habit of biting his fingernails. These reactions were mild, given the circumstances.

Maqsud left the living room in a mad dash for the bathroom. Nic could hear the sounds of him retching violently all the way from the main floor of the Corvette. Shanti, on the other hand, retreated into her bedroom, pulling a pillow over her head, disengaging completely.

Nic desperately wanted to summon the words that would comfort them all. He couldn’t. He didn’t know if such words even existed.

“RTIFIS,” said Nic, “please play the beacon one more time. I want to... I need... Just play it again, please.”

said their helpful AI.

An image of Hansen Dyne appeared on the living room screen. His eyes were unsettlingly wide, bags forming under them already. His usually meticulously coifed hair looked like it had been brutally disheveled and then hastily combed in preparation for the recording. He sat in silence for a few seconds.

The voice of his associate, a subordinate—Clotilde was her name—could be heard offscreen. She spoke harshly, as if scolding him. “Hansen, are you doing this or what? If you can’t, I’ll just record one myself. You can—”

“No,” he said. His voice cracked and he shook his head abruptly. “No, we’re wasting time. They need to hear this. It... It doesn’t matter. Guys, Hansen Dyne here. I, uh, wish I had more time to prepare something a little better than this. If you’re watching this beacon, it means you’re all safely inside your Corvette. If any one of you is still out there, please tell them to come inside, and please, please, please don’t leave your ship until you hear back from us again, okay?” Hansen ran a hand through his messy hair and looked at something offscreen. He heaved a deep sigh. “So, lots going on today. Big free-for-all match. You... Team Scarlet, you all did a phenomenal job.

“I wish this beacon was to congratulate you. Unfortunately, as you saw a little bit ago, things are not going... quite according to plan. I feel like this information should be coming from someone a little more official, like the WorldGov Chairperson, or at least our CEO. Doesn’t matter. Um... We have reason to believe that we are...” His eyes wandered off camera.

“Hansen,” Clotilde hissed at him.

“We are now entering a first contact scenario. And it was nothing like... nothing like any of us could have predicted. Nothing we saw coming.” He let the news hang there in the air. “This information was kept secret from you, but we’re way, way past this now, so I can just tell you. Red Terraforming’s probe detected life signatures on Nereus. These signatures were small but stable. Everything pointed to microbes. Yes, as I’m sure you’ve figured out by now, we put the cart before the horse here so to speak—old Earth saying. Doesn’t matter. Point being, we, uh, we sent you guys ahead without following usual protocol. We did this because we had reason to believe others would do the same.

“Surprise, Team Obsidian beat you there. Their...” He cleared his throat. “Their whereabouts, of course, are still under investigation. We had no evidence—no data, even, to suggest anything like this was going to happen. If we knew, we never, in a million—”

“We knew at the start of Round 6,” Clotilde cut him off. “When I told you to send the beacon. When I said we needed to call it off. And what did you say?”

“Jesus,” Jarek sighed on the couch next to Nic. “I can’t even believe that, man. That’s wrong.”

Hansen shook his head in silence. “Guys, there’s a lot of moving parts here. Bottom line, I just want you all to stay in your ship. Stay safe. We’re sending this up the ladder, obviously, to the highest levels of human government that exist. We are working nonstop right now. You may feel alone and scared and cut off, but I just want you to know that by the time you hear these words, we’re already three steps along in the process, all right? Hang tight. We’re compiling some intel and I’m advocating hard for you guys right now, trying to get you some more information on what’s going. We are working on... Clotilde, will you back off, please? I am this close to calling security—”

The beacon’s POV suddenly shifted to a view of Clotilde’s face. Her hair was pulled up in a tight bun, makeup on her face smudged. She frowned like an adult cleaning up a child’s mess. “Nic, make sure your squad sees this. We’ve already sent it to WorldGov—”

“Clotilde, if you send that, I swear to God—”

“—and you deserve to know the whole truth now, because you’re in it. Stay safe. Don’t try to leave, because RTIFIS won’t let you. We don’t know what they’re capable of yet. Don’t leave the ship until further—”

The Red Terraforming reps’ portion of the beacon cut off there, but the beacon continued. There was a jump cut to an entirely separate recording. Nic recognized it as drone footage taken above Nereus, partial clouds parting as the sky threatened dusk, but there was something else. He couldn’t quite wrap his head around what he saw even on the second viewing.

“My God, there it is,” Perri breathed, covering her mouth.

The object was egg-shaped, flying horizontally. It was ghostly, nigh transparent in the dimness of dusk, its shape visible only by the ripples of light around its boundaries. Lights twinkled on and off along the edges of the craft at seemingly random intervals. There was a softness to these lights; they were powerful at times but also fuzzy, not crisp and clear like a naked electrical light—they were different somehow. Nic thought of glowing jellyfish he’d seen in a sim once but forgot the word for their light.

At the drone’s closest pass to the object—or vice-versa—the interior of the craft was partially revealed. This aspect was translucent; nothing inside could be seen clearly, even with the drone’s light-and-color-correcting scans. But something was moving inside. Shadows of different heights stood still, then some of them moved slowly to another part of the ship while others remained. It was like watching someone’s movements behind frosted glass. Their shape, size, even color, and any other details were all obscured, but the cadence of their movements betrayed the activities of living creatures.

Then, in a split second, the craft disappeared.

“They knew!” Maqsud yelled indignantly from the lower level of the ship. “They knew and they still let us carry on like that!” His volume steadily increased as he stomped up the stairs to the main floor of the Corvette, barging into the living room. “Have they the foggiest clue what they’ve done? Those loathsome, bloodsucking—”

“There’s nothing we can do to change what already happened,” said Nic calmly. The others watched him intently; he still didn’t know what to say, and didn’t know how obvious that was, but he tried anyway. “It’s... It’s okay to be freaked out right now. No one has ever been through this before. I won’t lie to you guys and pretend that everything will be okay. But we also don’t know that everything won’t be okay. Maybe things will land somewhere in the middle. A compromise, or something.”

“If blowin’ up one of our drones is their idea of a compromise,” said Jarek, “I don’t wanna see ‘em get mad.” There was a film of sweat on his forehead.

“Well, considering we were shooting bullets and bombs all over the planet—what could be their planet,” Nic replied, “then I’d say attacking an unmanned aircraft might not be all that bad. But we won’t know anything more until we hear back from—”

RTIFIS interrupted.

Maqsud scoffed. "‘Speak of the devil and he doth appear.’"