“[I am afraid,]” said Shanti through her thought-to-speech cranial link.

“Are you really going to hold us to these orders, Nic?” Maqsud asked fearfully. The usual self-assuredness was conspicuously absent from his voice.

Nic hesitated before answering. He’d been raised with the vague idea that disobeying authority could be a good thing in certain specific circumstances; however, he never quite knew what those circumstances looked like, and he feared his disobedience would only be rewarded if it proved successful. The difference between rebellion and a revolution, he thought with uncommon clarity. Still, he didn’t have the heart to force his squadmates to go through with something like this, and it was this weakness that ultimately decided for him.

“No,” Nic replied. “I won’t make anyone go who doesn’t want to go. If you want to stay on the Corvette, you can. But I’m going.”

“I’ll go, too,” said Jarek.

“Me, too,” Perri added.

Max sighed heavily in his vac-armor. “Well, I suppose it’s nearly unanimous, then. What say you, Shanti?”

“[I’m afraid. My friends are afraid.]” There was a moment of silence by the airlock. “[I don’t want my friends to be afraid alone.]”

“Then I would be remiss to wait here all by myself like the coward I am at heart,” said Maqsud. “Count me in.” He breathed in and out a few times heavily and then added, “‘There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.’”

“I like that,” said Perri. “Did you think of that yourself? Or who said that?”

Max shook his head. “I’d wager you wouldn’t be much of a fan, Perri. It’s best to take that quotation at face value.”

“Feels more like a millennium’s happenin’ in a day,” Jarek opined.

“Don’t worry, Team Scarlet,” said Nic as the interior airlock door closed behind them. As ever, he had trouble taking his own advice. “If all goes well, this’ll be completely uneventful. That’s the goal.”

A follow-up beacon from Red Terraforming, Inc instructed Team Scarlet to leave the Corvette for an important mission. They were to retrieve and collect all pieces of the downed Wargame drone—including its volatile cargo of guns, Upgrade Paks, and other munitions. Team Tyrian would be assisting them, and RTIFIS would be highlighting pieces for them along the way.

“It’s important we go out there and do this manually,” Hansen Dyne had explained in the pre-recorded message. “These beings may have an aversion to artificial intelligence or may have seen the drone as a threat somehow—we can’t take any chances. We have to show them we mean no harm. That’s what WorldGov’s top theoretical xenobiologists are saying, anyway. Huh. Theoretical... I guess their job title changes as of today. Anyway, Team Scarlet, there’s been no sign of the object we saw earlier. We have no reason to believe you’re in any immediate danger—but we’re gonna be watching every second regardless, okay? Now get out there and earn your pages in the history books! Oh, what now, Clotilde? I’m trying to motivate them...”

Nic led his four squadmates out of the Corvette and back onto their former battlefield. The Nereus night sky was awash with stars and there wasn’t a cloud in sight; the planet’s singular moon was a hair-thin crescent over the horizon, casting the faintest reflective sheen on the moist terrain. Nic kept glancing skyward for any signs of the otherworldly craft he’d seen in the top-secret beacon. Nothing yet, he thought. Good.

All five members of Team Tyrian pitched in as well. It was awkward working with them on the same joint assignment after all of their prolonged conflict and in-game trash-talking. The purple players must have felt the same way, as neither squad said anything to the other. Nic could feel his face grow hot with inscrutable shame, as if he’d been chastised for doing something childish... making a game of war.

Both squads each loaded debris and fallen weapons into their own respective trailers attached to Centaurs. RTIFIS tagged objects of interest for Nic and outlined them with a faint red glow. He picked up a Fragmentation Grenade and a Pistol, chucking them unceremoniously into the trailer before going back for more.

RTIFIS advised him.

“Understood,” Nic replied in the privacy of his helmet. I just want to get this over with as quickly as possible.

Harvesting scraps of cooled molten metal, a frightening realization finally clicked in his head. Their melted edges were similar to the piece of the Red Terraforming probe they’d recovered as part of their first mission on this planet. So much had happened with the Team Free-for-All, and now this, that their simple recovery mission was now a distant memory crammed into the back of his cramped consciousness.

They must have attacked the probe, Nic thought. They attacked the drone... Maybe Hansen was right. Maybe they really don’t like things that fly on autopilot. It was unspeakably bizarre to be pondering the thoughts and preferences of a completely inhuman intelligence—so much so that it made his heart race.

“Y’all doin’ okay?” Jarek asked in the team chat.

“Yeah,” Perri answered shakily.

Chuckling, Max answered, “That seems a strong word given our circumstances, but I suppose so.”

“[Yes.]”

“Good,” Nic chimed in. “We’re making progress here, Team Scarlet. Just a few more minutes and we should be all done. Hang in there!”

Team Tyrian had already cleared a substantial swath of the wreckage from the crash site, including the larger part of the drone fuselage, the bulk of which Nic could see jutting out the back of their oversized trailer. A smaller wing and portion of the drone’s body remained. It probably won’t all fit in theirs, Nic reasoned. We should take care of it.

“I need some volunteers to help me with that drone part,” said Scarlet 1, and Jarek and Shanti trotted to catch up to him. He wasn’t sure that they could lift it with just the three of them. He wrapped his metallic vac-armor gloves around a sharp edge of the wing’s underside, squatting. “We’ll go on three. One... Two... Three!”

Almost miraculously, his suit of powered armor took the brunt of the weight. It felt like he was lifting something made of foam; it was more unwieldy than heavy. “I could probably lift this myself,” Jarek chuckled. “This vac-armor’s clutch! How much you think this thing weighs?”

RTIFIS explained. It was much heavier than Nic thought; his suit really did do most of the heavy lifting for him.

Just a few minutes later, Teams Scarlet and Tyrian were tidying up the last tiny fragments of debris. There were still no signs of the unidentified object in the sky. For all we know, they could have been just passing by, thought Nic hopefully. Either way, even if we never actually make contact... life will never be the same. His competitive nature couldn’t help but wonder about the results of the Sudden Death match—he was already growing impatient to hear the official score. One thing at a time, Siegfried.

Team Tyrian’s Centaur rumbled away from the crash site. Nic examined the Scarlet Centaur, realizing that it was a four-seater—someone would have to walk back to the Corvette. “Perri, make sure this trailer makes it back to our ship,” he told Scarlet 3. “I’ll have to hoof it.”

“You don’t want to ride in the trailer?” she asked him. “Or, I mean, I could even ride back there if you wanted.”

“I’d rather neither one of us be jostled around with grenades and guns,” he answered, tapping his own vac-armor helmet. “It’s just us in here now, you know.”

“Right.” Perri audibly winced, sucking in air through her teeth. “I’ll try not to hit any potholes. Hurry back, okay?”

He nodded. With that, his squad piled into the Centaur to make the drive back to the Corvette. RTIFIS set a helpful waypoint for him; he could already see the outline of their ship in the distance, and he set out for it on the trail of the all-terrain vehicle.

Nereus was peaceful at night. There were no clouds, nor even the slightest breeze that he could detect through his suit. He heard only the distant rumble of the Centaur’s engine growing quieter by the minute and his own muffled footsteps clattering rocks together and squishing mud. He drank in the stars, the glorious tapestry of the cosmos laid out above him, and thought that tonight—today—whatever time it was in his jumbled schedule—the universe felt just the tiniest bit smaller.

Then came the sound of rushing wind.

Droplets of water fell upward. Then flecks of mud. Then pebbles. Nic felt a force lifting him from below—it was not unlike buoyancy in water. By the time he even began to wonder what was happening, it was impossible to escape.

He soared into night sky against his will, screaming his lungs out, taking one last terrified glance at the indicator in his HUD.

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