The Hive was buzzing again when Carrie and I reached it for our next training mission. Hercules and his team were suiting up for another multi-week adventure in one of the staging areas, and it was supposed to be a huge one. It was also the first mission I had heard about with real consequences outside the game—other than death, of course. Six guilds, each fielding three full teams of eighteen, were competing for control of a small moon with huge deposits of natural resources and scarce elements. There were three objectives: a starfight to control the space around the planet, an infiltration and hacking mission at an orbital docking port, and then a ground assault on a heavily defended mining base.

If it wasn’t a mission with true death on the table, I would have loved to go along. Such a grand, complex mission was no doubt going to be incredible. But I was still years from that kind of thing. From what I could tell, the lowest level on any of the three Hanseatic League teams was a level fifty-one Space Pioneer. According to Carrie, the Space Pioneer would be integral to the ground mission since he had knowledge and skills related to off-planet colonies.

Once the mission was won and the ground team established a forward base, more missions would become available for other guilds to try and recapture the mining operation. It was that kind of thing—constant battles over real objectives—that largely kept the guilds from going outside the missions to slaughter each other. It still happened from time to time, but wars like I had known on Earth were extremely rare.

Hercules and his team finished preparing, and they dropped in on the huge Hiveboard screen. Unlike all of my drops, Hercules slid gracefully into the pilot seat of his sleek starfighter. The rest of his team loaded up into more fighters, a transport, and a recon ship, and then they were off. From what everyone said, it would take several days for the teams to even reach their destinations, and there was tons of work to be done along the way.

Turning from the screen, Carrie and I made our way to our own staging area for the day’s training session. Like the very first one, we started in a briefing room with Zhenya and a huge screen full of data, blueprints, and other crucial information.

Our next mission was an escort. We were tasked with guarding a freighter—essentially a truck from back on Earth but instead of wheels, it had six anti-gravity pads that let it hover—from a mining site to a launch pad. Once we reached the launch, a crew of NPCs would unload the cargo from the freighter onto a starship, and the mission would only end once the ship left the surface.

For enemies, we were told to expect a heavy assault from flying aliens that more or less resembled cockroaches. Our adversaries were aptly named Roachoids, and we were assured several times by Zhenya that they didn’t exist in real life. They were simply creations used for training purposes. That was good, because a seven-foot-tall flying cockroach wielding a rifle wasn’t something I wanted to confront.

Probably the most fascinating aspect of the escort mission was that my group, Team A, would be racing against Team B. We had identical missions with identical objectives, and the first team to complete theirs would be victorious. Still, it was a training mission so there were no monetary rewards, but I liked the challenge either way.

Our team decided to split in half, following our usual tactics. Team Surf had Choo, our only Scout, and would move ahead of the freighter to make sure the path was clear. Team Turf, complete with our Danish Pilot Noah, would guard the vehicle itself. I decided to stay with the freighter. If the scouting team got lost or bogged down and took me out early, we would probably lose. Staying with the target, while not my favorite place to be, felt like it was the most safe decision.

We suited up, and then the drop into the mission was much more forgiving than before. A wall panel opened with a hiss of steam and electronics, and we walked down a short ramp into a jungle landscape buzzing with activity. Tall trees dominated my vision, complete with all sorts of buzzing insects, flying birds, and alien mammals swinging from limb to limb.

Noah’s twin, our Planetologist, instantly ran to one of the trees with her mouth agape.

“Over there by the pit,” Shane announced, pointing the barrel of his plasma flamethrower toward a huge excavation.

At least a hundred NPC workers, some human and others alien, were busy loading something into crates and stacking them on the hovering freighter. Whatever resources they harvested, it looked dangerous. It was viscous, kind of like mercury from a broken thermometer, but it glowed with a rainbow of shifting, pulsing colors.

“Any idea what that is?” I asked Carl, our Xenobiologist.

He shook his head. Our whole group—except the Planetologist who was still off doing her own thing—approached the freighter. The workers noticed our arrival, but they didn’t stop loading the substance into crates and stacking it. I had no idea how the thick liquid didn’t spill or leak from the wooden crates, but that was an issue for another time.

One of the NPCs greeted us with a wave of his clipboard. “You lot must be the escort,” the gruff man said.

Choo took the lead. “Yes, sir. How much longer before we depart?” She was all business.

The man looked over his documents and back at the freighter. “Last load is going on now. Best to take up positions and get ready.”

Carrie bumped into me and nodded toward her hand. The guts of her alarm clock had made it through the staging area and into the mission. I still had no idea what she was actually capable of doing or how any of it would be useful, but I nodded in return, happy that at least the first step of our plan was a success.

Shane gave no heed to the workers still loading the freighter. He climbed up the side and perched on top, flamethrower in hand, much to the dismay of those still loading crates.

Finally, the Planetologist returned just as the freighter was getting secured for the trip. “They’re transporting neuro-sap,” she said with a smile. “This planet produces trees, and the trees feed on psychic energy swirling at the planet’s core. I’ve never… only in movies or books. It is truly remarkable.”

“What’s it do?” Carrie asked. She sniffed around one of the crates and crinkled her nose.

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Our Planetologist was quick to explain. “I believe it acts as a poison. Some kind of bioweapon. In semi-liquid suspension, it should be relatively harmless. But if you aerolize it and spray it like a gas, it is deadly in minutes.”

Not everyone was as enthusiastic about the mission as her. Rifle Guy asked the question on all of our minds: “Are we… are we the bad guys here? I mean… gas weapons are against the Geneva Convention, right?”

“None of this is real,” Choo reminded him. “Just do the mission, win, and get ready to do it all again tomorrow.”

One of the NPCs stacked the final crate, and the freighter hummed to life. It rattled a few degrees back and forth, then lifted another foot off the ground.

“Team Surf, on me,” Choo commanded, and her three companions fell into step beside her. They took off down the primitive road and were out of sight before long.

Noah quickly became our de facto leader. He was a pilot, and the mission involved moving a vehicle from one location to another, so it made sense. He let Shane keep his perch on top of the cargo, then positioned our Cultist at the rear with his twin sister. I was going to ride inside the vehicle with Noah and our NPC driver.

I climbed inside, and the cabin was much more spacious than expected. The driver’s seat reminded me of a typical semi truck back on Earth, and then there was a second chair for Noah and a long bench behind both. Above the bench was a hatch. It led both up to Shane atop the cargo and into the cargo hold itself.

With a rumble, the freighter began to move. I guessed it chugged along probably no more than fifteen miles an hour. Behind us, a thick plume of smoke lifted off from the vehicle’s exhaust, and I couldn’t help but think it would be a radiant beacon to any flying enemies looking for us.

“Hey, Noah. How armored is this thing?” I knocked on the side wall panel, and it felt solid. I just hoped it would hold up against rifles and whatever else the Roachoids were going to throw at us.

“As far as I can tell, it should hold up to small arms fire. But I don’t really know for sure.” Noah flipped through a manual he had found somewhere and shook his head, obviously not finding what he wanted.

“Great.” I positioned myself as central as I could, hoping that any bullets punching through the sides would hit the bench and not me.

About thirty minutes into our slow, rumbling journey, Choo came running back to the convoy. I learned forward to catch the details as she relayed them to Noah. The path up ahead was clear, no ambushes, and they could see the shuttle launch site, though they hadn’t made it there yet. At our speed, we were still over an hour from reaching the destination.

So far, no sign of any Roachoids. I didn’t know if that was a good thing or a bad thing. It would have been great if Choo had reported a huge battle and victory of the flying insects, but I knew we would never get that lucky.

Another uneventful fifteen minutes elapsed, and then we all finally got our first glimpse of the Roachoids. It started as a soft buzz, something I quickly attributed to the engine or the anti-gravity pads, but then it escalated. In the span of thirty seconds, the buzzing was too loud to ignore, and I knew we were under attack.

Two Roachoids came from the jungle canopy, swooping down and firing their strange weapons all over the convoy. They didn’t seem to be aiming or targeting anything specific, just mindlessly firing. One Roachoid swooped in too low, and Shane roasted it with his plasma flamethrower. It was a quick kill. The second was at least a little more timid, staying out of Shane’s range while it showered the area in rifle shots.

One of the shots slammed into the freighter’s cabin not far from where I sat. I heard it, and the concussion it produced inside the metal shell was painfully loud, but it didn’t even bend the vehicle’s armor. Probably not even much of a scratch on the outside, though I wasn’t brave enough to go check.

I was about to yell up to Shane to see if he could take out the last bug when our Cultist fired a devastating blast of lightning. The deadly white arc slammed into the insect in the blink of an eye. It shuddered and seemed to pause mid flight, then simply disintegrated like an old cartoon character who had just swallowed dynamite.

Impressed, I sat back on the bench and finally let out a breath. The Roachoids weren’t so bad.

The freighter came to a bend in the road, and I spotted Carl running full speed for us. He was clutching his arm, and his pistol was nowhere to be seen.

“What happened?” Noah yelled before Carl reached us.

“They… they were setting up an ambush…”

Noah grabbed Carl and hauled him into the cab, then maneuvered him to the bench with a rather elegant move for the confined space.

I pulled Carl’s fingers from his wound, and it didn’t look too bad. Minor lacerations in a diagonal pattern, not too deep, and nothing lodged in his bicep.

“Did you clear the ambush?” Noah asked, his eyes glued to the front windshield.

Our NPC driver was eerily silent through the entire thing, just plodding along without a care in the world.

Carl nodded, his face a mask of pain.

“Here, this will help the pain,” I said, injecting him with a pain killer shot. “Come on, it isn’t that bad though.” I wrapped a bit of gauze around Carl’s arm, and his breathing finally started to settle down. The man really had no pain tolerance whatsoever.

“We cleared out at least a dozen of them. They were hiding in a ditch on the side of the road covered in leaves and sticks. One of them swiped me. Their claws! They’re huge. I… I fucking hate bugs, man.” Carl wiped some of the sweat from his forehead and started to relax, though not much.

I grabbed him a water pouch from my medical supplies and unscrewed the lid for him. “You can stay here for a bit until you calm down, and then you need to get back out there, alright?”

He nodded, gulping down mouthfuls of water.

A few minutes later, we passed the site of the attempted ambush. A few wisps of smoke rose from a dugout trench on the side of the road. Honestly, the ambush was too rudimentary. It didn’t feel right. Even a dozen Roachoids probably wouldn’t do much against even a low level group like ours.

Carl eventually recovered, and we sent him back into the jungle to reconnect with the scouting team. Another pair of Roachoids came out from the canopy much like the first pair, and, in extremely similar fashion, they were melted.

None of it felt right. I had only been on a few missions before, but they had all been frantic. Constant movement, stacked odds, death around every corner—not a casual drive through the woods. I was actually fairly bored with the whole thing.

“Noah, you think these Roachoid creatures are weird?”

He gave me a confused look. “I don’t know. Probably?”

“It feels… like they’re scouting us, not the other way around.”

“What do you mean?”

I thought about it for a little, and things started lining up. “The Roachoids obviously know where we are. They know where we’re going. They know what we’re doing, and they probably know what that neuro-whatever is in the cargo hold. So why send just a couple to their deaths?”

“They’re testing our defenses,” Noah said after a moment. “They just want to know what we have. They’re insects. There are probably a million Roachoids out there. They don’t care at all about the individual, just the swarm. Why not toss away a few dozen to learn what we’re capable of before the big attack?”

“Exactly.” I unlocked the hatch leading to the top of the cargo and relayed the theory to Shane. The strange mutant just nodded and kept his eyes peeled.

A few minutes later, we got our first taste of the real enemy.

A handful of Roachoids descended from the trees in a tight group, their shots a notch more accurate than the previous few attacks, and then hundreds followed. The only things saving us from instant annihilation seemed to be the primitive weapons they used combined with their ‘rush in and hope for the best’ tactics. The alien creatures didn’t have any semblance of coordination or strategy. They flew head on, firing rapidly.

Shane cooked half the group in a single sweep of his plasma flamethrower. I watched from the hatch, ready to spring into action to save whoever needed saving. The Roachoids who managed to survive the flamethrower were all zapped to death by the Cultist and his electric staff. The attack was vicious, but it didn’t actually result in much damage. The freighter’s hull took at least a hundred hits, none of them puncturing, and beyond that, the Cultist was the only one to actually catch a Roachoid bullet.

When I tried to patch up the Cultist, he shooed me away, muttering something in his heavy accent that I couldn’t catch.

“We have a problem,” Noah called.

I turned back from the Cultist to see what was going on.

Noah leaned out of the cab with a worried look on his face. “Their bodies. There are too many. We have to clear the road before we can continue.”

The road in front of the freighter was littered with huge insect corpses, most of them burnt beyond recognition. The freighter’s anti-gravity pads kept it a foot or two off the ground, but the bugs were piled at least five feet high.

“Can we push through them?” I asked the NPC driver, not wanting to waste any time.

The man shook his head. “They’ll clog the