Mission life was very different from shore leave or even transit life. Outside of active missions, Team Scarlet had a lot more breathing room with how they spent their time. Not so when on duty. Life at Red Base was strictly structured down to the minute.
0500: Lights On.
0530-0630: Breakfast.
0700-1200: Block One.
1200-1300: Lunch.
1300-1800: Block Two.
1800-1900: Dinner.
2100: Lights Out.
All squads were required to complete at least a five-hour block of sim training per day, along with a five-hour field training exercise, but they had the small luxury of choosing the order of those obligations each day, unless they were needed to fill open spots. The only exceptions came when there was a day-long or multi-day exercise—those were always mandatory—or when lieutenants like Welch wanted to be needlessly strict with latecomers. Hard-ass, Nic kept thinking bitterly every time the officer crossed his mind. Meal breaks were an hour to account for travel time to and from the mess hall.
But Team Scarlet’s arrival time meant they’d missed lunch. It was straight into FTX for all four of them. Nic and the others took their places on a barren white battlefield, shoulder to shoulder with dozens of other soldiers in red Gen-Three Achilles armorsuits. Four lieutenants stood before the group in their own armorsuits with their hands folded behind their backs, but only one was doing the talking.
“FTX starts in five minutes,” Lieutenant Welch spoke loudly on the general comms channel. “We have a few newcomers today, so I’ll give you a brief rundown.” That got Nic’s attention. Newcomers. I didn’t hear about that. “Field training exercises consist of real vac-armor deployment paired with state-of-the-art augmented reality overlays. For those of you slower on the uptake, that means you’ll be out here in the field and fighting holograms. The Hexes will be virtual. Your ammunition and your damage will be virtual. The suits and guns are obviously real. Treat this as a real mission using the real terrain you see before you. Is that understood?”
“S-Sir?” said the voice of a young man. Nic didn’t recognize him; it could have been a Red Battalion soldier from another squad he didn’t know or one of the newcomers Welch mentioned. “I have a—”
“Save questions for the end, son,” Welch cut him off. “FTX starts in thirty seconds. Ready up, soldiers! Those bug-eyed bastards haven't permanently captured a single human colony, and they damn well aren’t gonna start with this one! Terra et populus!”
“Terra et populus!” came the practiced replies. Nic wondered about the identity of that nervous soldier. It must have been a newbie since no one with FTX experience would bother asking a question so close to launch.
He’ll just have to learn as he goes. Just like everybody else.
***
Nic was already sore when he led his squad to the mess hall for dinner.
“Lady and gentlemen,” said Maqsud, “I hope you’ve cultivated a Herculean appetite. We’re all going to need it to stomach this slop.”
At the counter, a robotic serving arm doled out portions of food on terraplastic trays. Nic and his squadmates each took a tray and sat at the end of a long bench-style table.
They were never told exactly what the food on base was exactly, as each food was only labeled by its main macronutrient. A pile of rubbery grayish-brown crumble had a card that said “PROTEIN” next to the container. A flavorless beige mush was “CARB.” Last but not least, there were fluorescent orange sheets that were probably meant to resemble cheese—this was “FAT.” Some of the more jaded soldiers and officers joked that it was all made from ground up Hexadian carcasses or GDF recruits who didn’t pass basic training, and Nic wasn’t sure which version of the joke disgusted him more.
If anyone complained, they were always met with some variation of the same retort: “You want a five-star meal, you better earn some credits out there! That’s what the commissary’s for!”
It was his second mission when Nic discovered the commissary wasn’t much better, and offered little bang for exorbitant buck. He stopped asking those questions after that.
Showers on base were a far cry from their usual luxury. Showering on a private ship meant time to dally, time to breathe, time to get lost in the sweet absence of thought. Base showers were set to strict three-minute timers; it was enough time to soap up, rinse off, and run out the clock out of spite, but never enough time to enjoy it.
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Dinner. Shower. Bed. That’s how evenings usually went on missions. Nic set his bag on the bottom bunk below Perri’s.
She always preferred the top bunk. Since there was absolutely no fraternization allowed while on an active mission, they would be sleeping apart again for a while. They would have to subsist on traded smiles and whispered goodnights for the short-term future.
When the lights went out at 2100 sharp, the din of soldier activity in the barracks dorm started to taper off like the end of a rainstorm, the sounds of shuffling footsteps, creaking plastic beds, and yawns now mingling with the dying conversations. The room was home to over 130 soldiers and was made intentionally spacious. It wasn’t cozy like the bedrooms on the ship. Surrounded by all these strangers, it made Nic feel strangely vulnerable, almost naked.
He said a full-voiced goodnight to Jarek and Maqsud, followed by a whispered one to Perri, and closed his eyes to go to sleep. The room was dark except for the dim holoclock projecting off the wall. It read 21:02; he knew he’d be dreaming before it hit 21:04.
Or he would have been, if not for the screaming.
Nic jumped out of bed. “This is it,” he said, suppressing his panic. “Team S—”
“Sshhh, keep it down,” said another voice. It sounded female. “Do you wanna get us busted, man?”
“I’m sorry,” said another voice. This one sounded male—and young. His voice cracked like he was crying or had been recently. “I’m sorry. Can we please just talk to them about this in the morning?”
The conversation came from a pair of bunks in the corner of the adjacent bunk block. Nic shuffled down the aisle to the source of the noise.
“I heard a commotion,” said Nic as he approached. “Came to see if anyone needed help. I’m Nic from Team Scarlet.”
“He’s fine,” said another member of Red Battalion sitting up in her bottom bunk. She looked a little younger than Nic, with dark skin and coarse black hair pulled into tight twin buns. Her counterpart in the neighboring bottom bunk looked even younger still; he was slim with freckled pale skin, a freshly buzzed scalp of orange hair. “It’s our first mission. He’s a little spooked, that’s all.”
“Shouldn’t be a first,” Nic said, confused. “You’re Red Battalion. We were all grandfathered into service from Wargame.”
“No, I mean... our first combat mission,” the young woman clarified. “We just graduated as Wargame players not two weeks before the war happened. We’ve been on lighter missions, security stuff in terraformed colonies. You know how people have been going crazy since this all started? Riots and stuff?” Nic nodded. “Well, yeah. We were assigned to that. Team Brick. Last assignment was crowd control ops on Iridian for five weeks. This is our first mission with the... you know... them.”
Nic took a deep breath as his tired brain processed this information. “I see.”
“I’m Kincaid, Squad Leader. This is Danny.”
“Nice to meet you both.”
“I need to get out of here!” Danny exclaimed loudly, and Kincaid half-reached to cover his mouth.
“Danny,” she hissed, “I am begging you, will you please keep it down? We can talk this out together.”
Danny hugged his knees to his chest, rocking back and forth. “Why aren’t we using proxybots for this? We did that for Wargames and that worked for years and years, right? It would be safer than going out there in person!”
“If only that were still an option,” Nic chuckled. “We have a lot more GDF soldiers than there were Wargame players. I don’t know if there are enough old proxies to hand one out to every soldier. Even still, it was cheaper to produce proxybots with the old configuration—those were a lot more fragile than the Gen-Three suits we wear today.”
“Fragile?” Danny echoed. “L-like how?”
Yes, Nic thought. I’m getting through to him. “Well, joints being vulnerable to projectiles was a major concern back then. Still is now, but the newer models are getting better and better at protecting against that. Same goes for the acid attacks. Hexes love their organic weaponry. That stuff could burn straight through the old joint polymers, past your skin and clean through the bone in under a minute.” Danny shuddered. “Newer models are better at protecting against that. But this is bleeding-edge tech, and I doubt there’s enough material in the galaxy to give every soldier multiple proxies with all these upgrades.”
The hysterical boy shook his head. “No. This isn’t normal. We shouldn’t be doing this. I want to go back home, to the academy! I want—”
“Danny,” said Nic, grabbing him gently by his flailing wrists. “Danny. Listen to me. It’s normal to be afraid. But you’re going to be okay. Just stay with your squad leader, Kincaid. She’ll keep you safe. That’s what squad leaders do.”
“Yeah, right!” Danny scoffed. “Tell that to Scarlet Five!”
Nic couldn’t stop his jaw from dropping. What happened next was a blur.
There was a sound like a hammer striking meat. Someone gasped. The next second, Danny was on the floor, shielding his face, curled up in a ball, but he was silent save for his quick, shallow breathing.
“Shit,” Nic muttered. “I—”
“Danny, are you okay?” Kincaid asked, kneeling at his side. He nodded hurriedly, short, timid little nods, and he didn’t dare meet Nic’s gaze. “He’ll be fine. Go to bed.”
“I swear I didn’t mean—”
“Go. Now. We’ll sort it out another time.”
Her dismissal of Nic felt like chastisement and approval all rolled into one. He bolted before anyone else noticed, looking down in shame.
“Everything okay?” Perri whispered when he returned. “I heard somebody screaming, but I couldn’t hear what was happening. Somebody having nightmares? Jitters?”
He was glad that she couldn’t see his face. Don’t worry her, he told himself. “Yeah, it’s fine. Somebody needed help calming down.” He swallowed the dry lump of guilt in his mouth. “I helped.”
“Oh. Good job.” He heard her roll over in bed above him. “Goodnight.”
“Goodnight.”
Nic lay in his bed until 22:06 rubbing his sore knuckles and thinking about what he’d done. He wondered what Shanti would have said. Probably nothing good, if anything.
Mostly, he just wished that if Team Scarlet had to deploy on strange planets to fight this flesh-and-blood war, that all five of them could go through it together. He missed Shanti. They’d been without her now longer than she’d been part of the squad, but she left an indelible mark on them just the same. Now her absence was like a hole that would stay forever unfilled.
Or a scar, like the one on his chin. The one that felt drastically different for him since his Wargame days.
Or maybe it hadn’t changed at all.