“You’ve been practicing for this day your whole life,” Principal Ferenc told him. He addressed all of the students in Nic’s graduating class at Paradigm Preparatory Institute. “The results of these exit exams, as well as your Final Exam, will determine the course of your future. Proceed with the knowledge that all your hard work has led to this very moment. Remember that we’ve trained and taught you to be everything that you are today. It’s all led up to this.”

SHOOT TO KILL

“Team Scarlet, open fire!” Nic shouted.

He squeezed the trigger of his Submachine Gun and cut a jagged line through an alien’s head. Blue blood and brain matter splattered out onto the moist, rocky ground of Planet Nereus. Got one, he thought neutrally. His reaction was not quite celebratory but more so quietly pleased with himself. Stay focused.

A gray one raised its fist, signaling it was about to fire. Nic ducked with advanced notice—just in time for a spike to whizz past his left shoulder. Scarlet 1 responded by ripping out the pin from a Frag Grenade and chucking it at the offending alien squad. RTIFIS even outlined the optimal grenade path in a holographic arc on his HUD, helpful as ever.

When the explosive detonated, bits of alien viscera flew in all directions. The gray one was grievously wounded but kept on fighting; its comrades were deconstructed completely. Nic made a mental note: Four more kills. Good.

“This is a fantastic score, Nic. You should be proud. You’ve been a star student here at PPI.” The words of one of his teachers, Magister Dana, echoed in his mind from their last conversation in the elevator. He’d been nervous to leave his school, a massive underground facility on Planet Ayrus, Colony 228, and now he’d been to multiple planets. Now he was facing off against hostile alien soldiers on a world at the edge of the human-colonized sector of the galaxy.

It helped if he didn’t think about it too much. If he blinked away the thoughts, set his jaw, and concentrated on his objective, it became little more than a game to him. Nic liked playing games.

But only if he won.

He emptied the rest of his SMG magazine into the lobes on the sides of the gray alien’s head. They popped and collapsed in spurts of blue blood, much more fragile than the rest of its thick, leathery hide. The gray one went down hard.

“Low on ammo,” he muttered to RTIFIS.

the AI replied.

Nic saw another detachment of alien troops gliding down from the sky, already raining spikes down in the humans’ direction. He heard a voice behind him cry out in pain. Not one of mine, he thought. Keep fighting.

He raised his Pistol and pulled the trigger, popping a few rounds that pinged off the next squad’s gray alien. He couldn’t get a kill shot on the weak spots from this distance. Instead, he opted to shoot down their flotation devices. His shots easily tore through the jellyfish balloons’ thin membranes, sending all six of the aliens into a freefall to Nereus.

It wasn’t enough to kill all of them. It might hurt them at least, he reasoned, and he was relieved to see some of them damaged in the fall. The blue-skinned quill-alien snapped both of its spindly legs on landing, and then a yellow gorilla-armed one landed on top of it, a spike stabbing straight through its bulging black eye and out the back of its head. The blue one’s fragile frame was crushed beneath its comrade in a puddle of blue blood. Two dead on arrival. Not bad.

The other thick-skinned yellow aliens and the tall gray one took the landing better. The former took the brunt of the impacts on their oversized forearms, while the latter tucked and rolled into a series of somersaults, springing back to its feet mostly unharmed.

Nic hurled his second Frag, turning the short ones into a bluish slurry of unrecognizable remains. The tall one had most of its right hand amputated, one of its fingers dangling by a shred of gray flesh. It managed to launch a spike—Nic heard Abigail shriek—before he shot it through the sensitive part of its head, and it dropped. The Tyrian soldier had been skewered through her left elbow and one of her squadmates tended to her.

Too slow, Nic scolded himself. I should have killed it faster.

“I’m telling you, Nic, you can’t be so hard on yourself.” Magister Dana again. He wondered if she’d be proud of him now. Of course she would. Anyone would. His magisters, his friends from PPI... his mother. Nic was saving humanity, one bullet at a time.

said RTIFIS. Team Scarlet fell back a few meters to a cache of weapons deployed by a passing drone. Nic harvested more SMG magazines and Pistol clips as well as a Shotgun; proxybots, and by extension their vac-armor configurations, were only designed to hold two weapons comfortably, but he made due by strapping the Shotgun to his back, the Pistol on his hip, and carrying the Sub in his hands.

“Team Scarlet, status report!” Nic barked. He collected fresh grenades to add to his ammo belt.

“Think we’re good,” said Jarek. “No one’s hurt, right?”

“I-I’m,” said Maqsud, stumbling over his words—a rarity for him. “I’m fine.” He apparently had no witty remarks or philosophical quotes to share with the group. That concerned Nic; it was very unlike Max, and was a sign that Scarlet 4 was having a hard time adjusting to real combat.

For Nic, it came much more naturally, like slipping on a glove.

“This is insane,” said Perri. “Why did it have to be like this? Why did WorldGov insist on pushing them? All of this could have been avoided if we just left!” She looked around. “That Xanthic guy, Rolan—he’s not dead, is he?” No one said anything. There was a surreal weight to the air between them.

“[More of them,]” said Shanti’s thought-to-speech cranial link. Nic was grateful in that moment that he’d purchased it for her on Planet Baitian. With a conflict like this unfolding, he wondered when, or if, the five of them would ever be able to share a vacation together again. Scarlet 5 was looking straight up at more balloon-parachuting alien combatants.

“I don’t know if I should be sayin’ this now,” said Jarek in a private comms channel, “but I don’t think Max is okay. Somethin’ is... wrong with him. He could get hurt if he gets sloppy, so I’mma do my best to keep an eye out for him. Thought you should know.”

“Noted,” Nic said gratefully in the private channel, and then he switched back to the Scarlet team chat. “Guys, tell me the first thing you’re gonna do when we get back on our ship. Make it fast. A fun thing!”

“Play Furflower Island,” Jarek answered immediately. “Could use a cutesy sim after all this.”

“Hard same,” said Perri. “Either that or a cold shower. And you, Max?” He didn’t reply right away. Another extraterrestrial squad leaped out of camouflage high above them and began their descent, while the one Shanti spotted was nearly within shooting distance. “Max?”

“Read,” he answered numbly. “Get lost in... something else.”

“[Water my plant,]” Shanti replied. Nic remembered the little potted plant on the day she’d first purchased it on Baitian as well. It was her primary daily concern, and she doted on it like a richer person on a richer planet might dote on a pet animal. “[Then I want to play Furflower Island with—]”

A heavy shunk sound. Shanti fell over.

Nic didn’t register what had happened at first—his eyes darted back to the alien reinforcements, but they were already being picked off with Pistols and Sniper Rifle shots by other human soldiers. Then his eyes fell on one of the gray aliens he thought he’d killed.

This one had a little bit of life left in it, just enough to wield its weapon one more time. Then it collapsed, its head rolling lifelessly to the side.

Nic holstered his SMG and ran to Shanti.

“She got hit—Nic, oh my God!” Perri spoke in shocked gasps of air. “She’s hit!”

“Shanti,” said Jarek, but then he seemed not to know what to say after that. “It’s gonna be okay. Alright?”

All four of them were huddled around her now. A spike had hit the vulnerable, flexible skintight material underneath her helmet and above her torso chassis, right through her neck. Nic wanted to retch when he heard the sputtering wet sounds she made in her helmet. He’d never heard her voice before, not even once... and how he could hear her choking on blood.

“We need to get her out of here,” said Nic, a crushing weight closing in his chest. “RTIFIS, override WorldGov—”

“RTIFIS, is it safe to lift her?” Jarek asked.

Perri shot back, “We can’t help her here! It’s gonna have to be!” They crouched next to her, sliding their hands underneath her vac-armor.

“[Afraid!]” said Shanti’s cranial link, translating her panicked thoughts into audible, computer-generated words. Everyone went silent to hear what she had to say. Perri and Jarek both had their hands underneath Shanti’s vac-armor ready to lift, but their friend’s blood was already seeping out onto their gloves. “[Afraid! My plant! Who will take care of my plant? Who will take care of my friends?]” Her thought-to-speech software said nothing after that.

Perri spoke up first. “Stay with us, Shanti, okay? We need to fix you up. And you’re going to retire someplace green, a forest or a jungle or something, right? And you said I could come visit you, remember? Tell me about it again.” The silence that followed was not marked with her presence as it had been in the past. “Shanti?”

Shanti’s vac-armor slumped in their arms.

“Oh, Christ,” said Maqsud. “Oh, Jesus. I... There’s, there’s more of them. They’re landing now! Nic! God, Nic, stop! Wait! What are you doing? Nic!”

By that point, Nic was already charging at the dual squads of incoming aliens, spikes ricocheting at lucky angles off his durable vac-armor plating. He pulled the pin from one of his grenades, jumping to ram it into the mouth of a gray alien, breaking some of its teeth. It staggered backward. The explosion was enough to knock Nic on his back and kill a cluster of the enemy soldiers—notably the gray one, which had only a bloodied stump remaining where its head once was.

But it wasn’t enough.

He drew his Shotgun and started blasting more of them to pieces. When they were downed, he shot them again in their heads. He kept squeezing the trigger until his shots were hitting nothing but soil, splattering mud and blood with each pull.

He was made of nothing but training and muscle memory. He had been raised this way from the day his mother left him—raised for fighting, for warfare, real warfare, and for competition. A war was nothing but a game played to the death. He had been brought up to fight a war that was never waged, to play, and win, a game that never happened.

But now it was here.