Shit, Nic thought, plummeting toward the surface of Planet Telum. Shit! The Gryphon was no longer visible, obscured behind a dense cluster of clouds—likely windswept exhaust from an atmosphere pump. There was no way to tell if his squad had survived the sudden alien attack on their aircraft, to say nothing of the three other members of Team Brick still aboard the same vessel. Shit! This is not happening!

But it was.

“Team Scarlet, status report!” Nic barked into his comms. He was greeted with a strange, subdued, high-pitched whine in response. It was monotonous and didn’t change volume—likely some kind of interference, he guessed. He tried again. “Team Scarlet—”

On his second attempt, the whine became an earsplitting screech that caused him to jerk his head sideways reflexively, a mistaken attempt at escaping a noise that permeated his entire helmet. The same thing happened when he tried to contact Lieutenant Reeve and even Lieutenant Welch. He hoped against hope that he could somehow reach the two Team Brick members around him.

“Danny!” Nic called out. “Everett! Respond!” Their proximal channel was crystal clear, a good omen.

“I’m here, sir!” Everett answered right away. “What the hell was that? Is that normal?”

“Danny,” Nic repeated, “respond. Say something. Anything!”

“I-I...” Danny choked out, his voice trembling. The kid’s hyperventilating, Nic thought. His suit will correct that with a quick CO2 infusion any second now. “I, I’m—”

“Good enough! Engage jetpacks, both of you! Now!”

Nic kicked on his Achilles armorsuit’s thrusters, slowing his fall, and he landed upright on his feet. The Telum ground was grayish-white and covered in a fine layer of dust. There were a few loose rocks and boulders scattered around the landscape, probably remnants of past planetary collisions, along with numerous mostly shallow craters. It reminded Nic of Luna, Earth’s moon, a body he’d only seen in sims, if that moon also had the occasional clouds and was almost four times larger.

A quick survey of the area showed no nearby Hexadians or enemy aircraft—at least nothing in shooting range. Nic checked on his comrades.

Everett was able to stick his landing as well. Danny engaged his jetpack a second late; he hit the ground at an odd angle, rolling on impact. Nic knew that it wouldn’t hurt, not with the reactive impact foam to cushion even the most extreme landings, but he could still hear Danny’s breathing begin to slow, his gasps gradually giving way to scared little whimpers.

He felt a strange mixture of sympathy and disgust for the boy. Don’t be a dick to him, Nic scolded himself. Remember, this is his first real mission. Go easy on him. Don’t turn out like Welch.

“Everett, status report,” said Nic. The two standing soldiers both drew their SMGs and held them at downward angles.

The cocky Team Brick member nodded once, surveying the area. “I’m good. Not hurt. Just shaken up. I’ll shake it off, sir, don’t worry!”

“Just call me Nic,” said the Squad Leader. “But glad to hear it. Danny, status report.” The redheaded kid hesitated to answer, rolling over onto all fours. He was trying to pull himself together, stifling his own whimpers, swallowing them into silence. “Danny...”

“They g-got hit,” Danny answered.

“You saw what happened?” Everett asked. “Who? Who got hit?”

A ball of ice dropped into Nic’s stomach. “Danny, listen to me very carefully. I need you to tell me what you saw. Tell me who got hit.”

“K-Kincaid,” he answered weakly. “And... And Joyce. Alison...”

“Dammit,” Everett hissed. “You’re sure about that? Don’t go bullshitting us about something this serious. Did you actually see—”

“Everyone on that side of the Gryphon,” Nic mumbled, momentarily numb. “They all got hit. That’s what you’re saying.” I can’t do this again, he thought. It’s not real. It can’t be. At least Perri might have been safe... from the first hit. There’s no telling—

“I don’t know,” Danny finally answered, and his mere uncertainty as to the casualties brought a wave of relief crashing over Nic. It was no proof of life. Not even close. But it would have to do in the meantime.

“Wait,” said Nic, hit with a sudden realization. “RTIFIS was telling us the names of affected squadmates. RTIFIS had their vitals! RTIFIS, status report on Scarlets 2, 3, and 4, as well as Brick 1—”

the AI interrupted,

“Hyperlocal?” Everett echoed. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Nic sighed. He willed himself not to kick a nearby boulder, not to crack it down the middle with the strength of his powered armorsuit—and he could have if he wanted. But it was important to keep his emotions in check when in a position of leadership.

“Hyperlocal,” Scarlet 1 explained patiently, “means RTIFIS has no way to communicate with the Gryphon. Not the rest of the strike team, not Reeve, not Welch, not Red Base... All those instances, which are usually synced, are cut off for the moment. It means we’re working with an AI that currently exists only in our armorsuits. If RTIFIS can’t reach other instances, then we can’t reach anyone else, either. That also means we need to stick very close together or we’ll lose communication with each other, too.”

“Damn,” Everett sighed. “So, is this mission officially FUBAR or what?”

Nic had another idea. “Stay calm. We don’t even know that it’s FU yet, let alone BAR.”

Everett chuckled. “Wait, what?”

“RTIFIS, display most recent vitals of all nine members of Team Scarlet and Team Brick.”

Nic’s request conjured a holographic overlay that materialized in his HUD showing all nine names and a summary of their last-reported vitals. For himself and the other two present, it was a status report; for the six others, it was a snapshot of the moment they’d lost contact after being separated by the catastrophic attack. Checkmarks denoted confirmed readings and question marks were placed next to those whose current condition was unknowable.

SCARLET 1/NIC: [SAFE(✓)] 111BPM(▼), 97O2(▲), 37C(=), 131/79(▼) SCARLET 2/JAREK: [SAFE(?)] 105BPM, 97O2, 37C, 122/81 SCARLET 3/PERRI: [URGENT!(?)] 123BPM, 94O2, 37C, 129/78 SCARLET 4/MAQSUD: [SAFE(?)] 103BPM, 96O2, 37C, 125/74 BRICK 1/KINCAID: [CRITICAL!!!(?)] 144BPM, 91O2, 35C, 75/? BRICK 2/EVERETT: [SAFE(✓)] 105BPM(▼), 98O2(▲), 37C(=), 121/79(▼) BRICK 3/ALISON: [URGENT!(?)] 125BPM, 93O2, 37C, 101/71 BRICK 4/DANNY: [SAFE(✓)] 114BPM(▼), 96O2(▲), 37C(=), 124/82(▼) BRICK 5/JOYCE: [CRITICAL!!!(?)] 135BPM, 92O2, 36C, 99/60

Goddammit, was the only word that came to Nic’s mind.

“Critical?” Everett asked. “Is that... I mean, that’s gotta be bad, right?”

In fact, it was about as bad as bad got. Critical was one notch better than a corpse... but in the field, in live combat and kilometers from a real medical team with full supplies, it could prove to be a death sentence very quickly.

Either that, or Kincaid and Joyce were both already dead, and these vitals were just the last ones RTIFIS captured before losing contact.

Nic was too focused on Perri’s readout. Urgent. He didn’t expect the others to have the biometric categories memorized, especially without combat experience. “Safe” was somewhat misleading; it just meant that there were no immediate life-threatening changes indicated. Urgent meant that something was wrong and needed attention—an injury or some other bodily response to combat. Critical signified that someone was knocking on death’s door. Then, of course, there was the fourth category, which was simply Dead.

Nic set his jaw. He pushed his concerns for his Scarlet squadmates aside momentarily in order to bear some bad news. “I’ll be honest with you two. Kincaid and Joyce... I have to say, realistically, it’s possible that they’ll survive, but it’s not likely. Everything that I’ve witnessed out in the field since Nereus tells me that unless they get medical treatment back at Red Base very, very soon, they won’t make it. In the event they don’t, I’m very sorry for your losses.”

“Jesus,” Everett muttered. “Um... We, we don’t know that for sure, right? Here, let me try to flag them down. If I—AGHH!” He screamed at the sudden harsh, blaring noise in his helmet. It was so loud that Danny and even Nic flinched as well from the secondhand exposure through their local comms channel. “Shit! How did this even happen? Why would they send a strike team if they knew something like this was going to happen?”

“I promise you, Everett, this is not normal. The Hexadians are mixing up their strategy a little bit today, probably because we’ve been kicking their collective ass since they started this war.” Nic saw two images flash across his mind’s eye. A broken vac-armor helmet. A spike through someone’s neck. The ground was wet... water... blood... He blinked and it was gone. “One major change is the comms interference. They’re preventing us from coordinating effectively. I can’t be sure, but I think this has something to do with the way they communicate. In addition to verbal communication, they operate on this weird groupthink—it’s not telepathy exactly, but it’s kind of like that. WorldGov has tried to tap into it before with mixed results.”

Everett raised an index finger, his curiosity apparently distracting him from his potential losses. “Telepathy. So, you think their mind signals or whatever, that’s what’s jamming our comms?”

Nic nodded. “Yes, but it’s different. They can communicate with each other without jamming us up. This time, they seem to be doing it on purpose. It’s a targeted attack. Same thing with the giant spike through our windshield. They don’t normally do aerial combat, but that spike was damn near the length of the cabin, meaning it came from one of the Eggs we shot. They’re hitting us hard and early this time.”

“S-so, what do we do?” Danny spoke up. “Should we... um... head back to base and see what—”

“Danny,” Everett cut him off, “can you stop being a pansy for, like, five seconds? Show some respect! We just lost two of our best friends, and one of them was our Squad Leader!”

Silence followed. Nic let it hang in the razor-thin air of Planet Telum. He felt an impulse to rebuke Everett, to tell him to leave the discipline to the chain of command and stop picking on the kid. Hypocrite, he thought bitterly. He remembered what Danny had said about Shanti, and while it was out of line, so was Nic’s response. Scarlet 1 vowed not to let that happen again.

But he also knew that Everett must have been feeling a whirlwind of emotion after what was likely two devastating losses. He strove for patience with both of them.

“We’ll have time to grieve anyone we may have lost, but not now,” Nic said solemnly. He regretted saying we—it was like including himself in that group somehow spoke into existence the possibility that his own squadmates were dead, too. “Right now, the survivors need our help. With no vehicle, we’re hoofing it to the action. Collect yourselves. Weapons ready. We’re going.”

“B-but sir,” said Danny, “shouldn’t we—”

“Danny,” Nic said patiently, “we are going. We’re not going to sit around, and we’re sure as hell not going to retreat. Not with Perri...” He caught himself playing favorites. “Not with our squadmates still out there. Move out and follow my lead. That’s an order.” He set out in the same direction they’d been traveling in the Gryphon, east, and summoned the help of his AI companion once more. “RTIFIS, point us in the right direction as best you can.”

“You heard the AI. Danny, Everett, let’s move!”