Nic and the other three members of Team Scarlet stood on Planet Slate—or their avatars did, at least. Their true bodies were still aboard the Patrol ship, strapped into the SimSuits in their training room. It didn’t matter to Nic; he still treated the simulated mission as seriously as he would a live one.

He refused to have another squadmate’s blood on his hands.

said RTIFIS in Nic’s SimSuit helmet.

“I suppose you’re still committed to an authentic pain experience?” Maqsud interjected dryly.

“You know the drill, Scarlet 4,” Nic replied, all business now that they were in training mode once again. “Last drill before a mission is always set to Realistic. It’s nothing we haven’t experienced in the past. Keep performing like we have been in our last five drills and you won’t have to worry about any pain at all.”

“It’s just that I fail to see the point of needlessly subjecting ourselves to simulated injuries that feel entirely realistic right before an actual combat mission...”

Nic sighed impatiently. “If you have a problem with it, just remember the squadmate who can’t train with us today. What she had to go through. And be grateful that you can take off your suit in a couple of hours and be done with it.”

“Ah, where have I heard that before? This is merely self-flagellation projected onto the rest of us. Got it.” Maqsud cleared his throat. “Never mind—carry on!”

Nic set his jaw. He was grateful for the barrier of the skintight suit he was wearing, the helmet over his eyes, preventing him from escalating with Max, allowing his anger to cool. Max had always had an annoying habit of striking a nerve without warning, almost like it was a game to him. The Squad Leader spoke up before his mouthiest subordinate could wedge in any more wisecracks. “RTIFIS, mission start.”

Planet Slate was a barren, gray wasteland with a mountainous horizon and a dim yellow sun. It always reminded Nic somewhat of the surface of Luna, Earth’s moon, and it was likely designed that way. Ever since previous Wargame sims were repurposed for combat training and practice, Planet Slate’s main feature had become a sprawling hab erected around a weapons factory, and it always became the focal point of Defensive Op sims. The hab and factory layout, size, shape, and the location of the enemies changed slightly each time to prevent familiarity fatigue.

Even though the location, the planet, and the missions were never real, they were sufficient to give Team Scarlet decent practice between the real deals.

Team Scarlet’s avatars stood outside the Slate Weapon Factory in their pretend Achilles armorsuits. Nic’s HUD displayed a GPS radar showing the locations of alien combatants. He could already see three landed Eggs a few hundred meters ahead of them, about a kilometer from the facility itself. Nic tagged the location on his HUD.

“Visual on three Eggs, repeat, three Eggs at 286 meters southwest. Seed’s likely in orbit. No sign of parachuters. Atmospheric pressure is...” He glanced at metrics in the corner of his HUD. “...0.02atm, so enemies will be in their vacuum configurations. Default loadouts will only be effective against eyes and lobes. Team Scarlet, move up. Moderate speed.”

Nic led the way toward the simulated Hexadian invaders. His in-sim Achilles armorsuit had all the capabilities of a real one, and at Moderate speed, it allowed him to run at 60 kilometers per hour. Reactive impact foam had come a long way since its prototype inception in now-antiquated vac-armor, technology that had remained mostly unchanged for over a century. But war had a way of galvanizing industries and inspiring technological leaps.

“I see the first wave coming,” said Perri. “Fodders. A freaking... legion of them.”

“Let’s give ‘em a hot steel welcome, then,” said Jarek, the grin audible in his voice. “We got enough bullets to go around, don’t we?”

“You got that right,” Nic agreed. “Team Scarlet, engage!”

They had already closed the distance between them and the enemy ships. Since the Fodders were always the first wave sent out in larger-scale operations, Team Scarlet didn’t have to worry too much about cover. The squat, jaundiced, barrel-chested, gorilla-armed aliens were shorter than most humans at just over a meter tall, but what they lacked in stature they made up for with tenacity.

They were never armed with weapons and didn’t usually need them; their strategy was simply to charge at human soldiers and overwhelm them with sheer numbers. They would try to tackle, punch, kick, dig at the sensitive joints between a suit’s armor plates—or sometimes dogpiling on a soldier’s helmet was enough of a distraction to allow an armed comrade to take a kill shot. As their WorldGov-designated name implied, however, Fodders were usually slaughtered in droves before the more serious battle began.

Team Scarlet mowed down dozens of them with their submachine guns and pistols. RTIFIS highlighted optimal grenade paths for Nic, who lobbed the explosives into the center of the alien horde. Each detonation eliminated another cluster of Fodders.

“Some spillage in the corner!” said Max. He concentrated his fire on a smaller incursion of the vicious aliens, an almost single-file line charging straight at him and Perri. Nic’s attention was diverted to the spillover—so much so that he neglected his own quadrant. The line they’d held so well sprang another leak.

“This is goin’ sideways!” Jarek exclaimed. “What do we do, boss?”

“Do not give them another centimeter!” Nic barked. “We can still recover. Listen up!”

***

Nic pulled off his SimSuit helmet, sucking in a breath of fresh Simnasium air. It smelled like the ship, rather than like his own sweat and funk. It smelled of plastic and cleaning solution and a cinnamon air filter. “Good work, Team Scarlet,” he told them as they took off their own SimSuits as well. “That makes six drills with no casualties. Excellent recovery.”

“Does a half-casualty count?” Maqsud asked, rubbing his left elbow. Despite being out of his suit, the source of the imagined pain, it looked like he was still reeling from his simulated injury—a Sharpshooter’s spike that had penetrated his avatar’s arm joint.

Nic shook his head. “That’s nothing that we couldn’t have patched once the mission was done. I won’t hold it against you.”

Max gave a weak but genuine smile. “Well, that’s much appreciated, Nicolas. Then our streak remains unbroken.”

said RTIFIS.

“Oh, yeah,” said Jarek as the four of them exited the Simnasium. “I forgot we weren’t going FTL anymore. Feels kinda weird just doin’ outer space raw like this.”

“We travel through bubbles of warped spacetime that break the laws of conventional physics, but it’s the twentieth-century rocket tech that inspires awe?” Maqsud laughed.

Jarek chuckled and shrugged. “I dunno, man, it’s just... We normally go bing-bang-boom, A to B, maybe half an hour of flyin’ at normal speeds to the next planet. But we dropped outta FTL a day and a half ago.”

“It’s the proximity to that Anomaly RTIFIS told us about,” said Nic. “The WGSF doesn’t want us getting too close in our own FTL bubble.”

Max nodded. “Ah, yes, the Maw, as our adversaries would call it. I fully support exercising caution in their vicinity, unpredictable as they are.”

The Maw, Nic thought. WorldGov was notoriously tight-lipped about whatever intel they had regarding these Anomalies, which seemed to act as free-standing portals from one location in the galaxy to another. They know more than they’re letting on. Way more. They have them mapped somehow, or they’re monitoring all the entrances and exits at the very least. There’s no other way WorldGov would know when to allocate Battalion soldiers to certain planets.

A horrible, heavy, sour feeling settled into the pit of Nic’s stomach, the same feeling he always got before each real-life mission. He swallowed. “Okay, squad, you’ve got two hours to do what you want. Make ‘em count.”

Jarek and Maqsud plopped down in the living room to watch a short holo. Perri retreated to her room to read a book. Nic, in the meantime, cooked up one last meal in the kitchen, frozen chicken breasts—actual, real, lab-grown cuts of meat, not reconstituted protein sheets. We’ll be getting plenty of that slop in the mess hall on base, he thought glumly.

He plated four servings of pan-fried chicken breasts with roasted asparagus, and for dessert, a flash-thawed slice of frozen chocolate cake for himself and each of his squadmates. All three of them accepted his cooking with wide eyes and excited smiles. He was grateful to have purchased these treats on their last shore leave, but with this being their third consecutive mission, he wondered when they’d be permitted to have their next shore leave. He hoped it would be soon.

RTIFIS announced as Nic stowed everyone’s plates and forks in the Patrol ship’s dishwasher.

He made his way below deck for a quick shower. Perri was already in the second shower, the frosted glass door closed and clouded with steam, so he made his way into the first one. The press of one tile on the wall activated the hot water. He squeezed a generous handful of shampoo into his hand, lathering the apple-scented stuff into his scalp, letting the hot water soak deep into his skin. It would be the last luxurious shower he’d get to experience in probably a long while.

Or ever, said the bleak voice in his head. No... No, don’t do this to yourself again.

RTIFIS warned him gently. Nic missed their old Corvette. He missed when all five of them were still together, and when they had more space to move around, and Nic could shower until his fingertips were prunes and he’d gone totally numb to the water. At times, he missed life at Paradigm Preparatory Institute, as it used to be called, even more—when his greatest worries were tests and the pressures of social interactions. He missed a lot of things.

In the hallway outside the shower, Perri was already waiting for him. She stood wrapped in her towels, one for her body and one for her hair, and greeted him with a sad sort of smile they shared sometimes. That smile always seemed to tell him, Here we go again, huh? But he found some comfort in it every time.

Nic leaned against the hallway wall. Perri stepped toward him, leaning her head on his shoulder, and he put his arm around her. He caught a whiff of her shampoo and breathed in deeply. It wasn’t apple-scented like the rationed kind aboard their Zeta-Class Patrol ship; she must have bought it on one of their shore leaves. He couldn’t quite place the smell, but it was vaguely floral. Part of him wanted to ask her what it was. The rest of him was content to let it remain a mystery, to let it stay one of the little magical details about her that he couldn’t understand, like the way she somehow knew how to be there for him when he needed her most.

He felt older than his 19 years. Love and war had both aged him.

RTIFIS interrupted.

“Are you good?” she asked him, half-whispering.

“I will be until you take your head off my shoulder,” he answered truthfully. He kissed the top of her forehead. “Come on. We need to get dressed. Telum is waiting.”