The Game team and a large entourage of leadership and admin and support staff walked through a huge arrival terminal in the habitat. The terminal was built to handle thousands of people at once, but it was empty. Almost the whole habitat had been closed off. There were civilians still on board somewhere, Neb knew, but the team would never see them. The whole mission was classified. It wasn’t good press when people went off into the unknown and never came back.

The team’s footsteps echoed in the huge space. The ridges and lines of the architecture made Neb think of being inside something organic but fossilized. The artificial gravity of the habitat was slightly different to that of the transport ship, and he felt unsteady and woozy. If the others felt the same, they gave no sign.

The group walked without stopping past the desks where their travel authorization would normally have been checked, and on to a waiting train. They exited the train in the central space of the habitat, and all of them found their gaze being drawn upwards. The center of the habitat was almost entirely hollow, and rather than matching the sharp lines of the outer pyramids, the inner space formed an enormous smooth curving ellipsoid. The overall effect was as if they were standing near the bottom of a tall thin egg, looking up past endless rows of balconies to a narrow point that was almost a kilometer above them. The habitat was always figuratively and often literally in the shade of the Earth Gate, but even so it was a wondrous achievement in itself.

‘So much fucking wasted space,’ Jasper said. He was leaning back, his hands in his thick black hair, the lines of his jaw even more sharply defined than usual. Gray laughed.

‘Come on,’ Buzz snapped. ‘Every second is precious.’

They boarded a small military transport unit which brought them to their quarters, the machine humming down long corridors and through doors marked AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY until they stopped outside a door in an unremarkable-looking hallway.

‘Briefing down the hall in ten,’ Buzz said. ‘You’re in here. Get unpacked.’ He went through the next door and slammed it after him.

The rest of the team shared one space no matter where they stayed, even in a place like the habitat which had essentially an infinity of rooms. It was the military way. At the beginning of the mission, Neb had found the lack of privacy almost intolerable, like a constantly-pressing stress. But now the nightly cacophony of snores and sighs and furtive scratchings lulled him almost immediately to sleep. It was helped, of course, by how tired he was after the long days of briefings, reviews, trainings, exercises, and the endless, endless speculation about what the Game would throw at them. And that didn’t include the presentations Neb himself was asked to create and deliver to various higher ups who had never before bothered to speak to a Main scholar, and who were now taking the opportunity to do so ahead of the assumed imminent demise of this one. Most nights Neb was deeply asleep even before the call of lights out.

Their room in the habitat had clearly been in use for something else up until recently, and had been turned at short notice into a temporary bunkroom. Some empty boxes were still stacked in one corner, and it had the slightly-too-warm feeling of a room that had been heated up quickly after being cold for a long time. There were six beds placed around the edges in a U-shape, two to a side, and Neb found himself beside Anna. They went through the unpacking motions robotically -- they had moved around so much now that they could do the routine with hardly a moment of conscious thought.

‘You okay?’ Anna asked, as they arranged their stuff and made sure their beds were up to specification. It would be just like Buzz to check some bullshit like sheet symmetry when they were so close to the mission, a little reminder of the importance of relentless discipline. ‘Everyone knows you’re not just an academic liaison.’

Neb was surprised she had been able to hear Buzz’s remark. ‘I’m fine,’ he said. ‘Thanks to the outstanding work of Meathead and Mallory, I’m basically insult-proof by now.’

Anna smiled. ‘I mean really, though.’ She paused to look at him, and he met her searching gaze. She had dark hair that thickly framed a small forehead, and her sharply cut cheekbones seemed almost too long for her face. Her lips sat naturally in a way that was half-pout, half-smile. But even with all the competing perfection, what stood out most were her eyes -- a shining blueish green, like water seen from far above.

In her role as second in command, Neb often saw her check in quietly with the folks on the team, a word here, a question there, just as she was doing with him now. And yet there was something distant about her, a small but unbridgeable gap.

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He looked away. ‘I’m fine, Anna,’ he muttered. ‘Or at least, as fine as any of us.’

She touched his arm. Then there was a burst of laughter from behind them. They turned to see that Mallory and Jasper had managed to lift Meathead up to grab on to a cross-beam high in the arched ceiling, and now he was starting to do pull-ups on it. His vast bulk was causing visible stress on the beam. Each pull-up caused a little sprinkle of plaster to fall to the ground below, and the beam gave an ominous creaking sound.

‘TWENTY FIVE YOU FUCKING LUMP!’ Mallory was shouting, ‘TWENTY FIVE IS THE BET!’ Jasper, Gray, and Meathead himself whooped and hollered. The noise was suddenly raucous, their belongings half-unpacked and forgotten on the beds below.

‘Fourteen…’ Meathead gasped, his huge arms pumping, sweat popping on his forehead. ‘Fifteen…’

‘You can do it, Meathead!’ Jasper yelled up to him. ‘LET’S MAKE SOME FUCKING MONEY!’

‘JUST GIVE IT UP YOU FAT LUMP!’ Mallory’s big voice boomed in. ‘YOU CAN’T FUCKING --’ But his words were lost in an impenetrable overlap of shouting.

‘Twenty…. Twenty-one…’ Meathead puffed, fully focused on his task, ignoring the shouts. ‘I’m going to fucking make it!’ he huffed, sweat dripping off his chin. ‘I’M GOING TO FUCKING --’

But even as he spoke there was a keening, painful sound from the beam. It yielded and came free from its mounting on both sides, and Meathead fell backwards and crashed down onto Mallory’s bed, completely obliterating it.

‘YOU FUCKING IDIOT!’ Mallory bellowed, suddenly enraged, leaping forward and trying to haul Meathead from the wreckage. ‘GET OFF MY FUCKING BED!’ But Meathead was laughing too hard to move. The upset look on Mallory’s face just set him off more. Jasper and Grey held each other, hardly able to stand.

Anna sighed. ‘Guys,’ she said quietly. ‘Briefing time.’

She and Neb slipped out the door, leaving Mallory shaking Meathead angrily while Meathead howled with laughter, unable to even try and defend himself.

Buzz was already in the briefing room when Anna and Neb took their seats. The commander did not acknowledge their presence, his eyes focused on a screen. The room was silent for a long moment, but then the other four soldiers entered. Only the faintest afterglow of anger and laughter was still detectable.

‘You fucking lug,’ Mallory whispered to Meathead, who kept his face clamped in non-reacting stillness, so that his laughter showed only in his eyes.

‘Okay,’ Buzz said, glancing at them. A three-dimensional image appeared over the long central black projection screen of the table, showing the Game transport craft, known as the gamejumper, and key weapons and equipment that they would be bringing. He paused. ‘This is the last one of these.’

No-one spoke. They had done hundreds of sessions just like this one over the last two years, in countless different places -- on Earth, in habitats, at Mars Central, and on more ships than Neb could remember. Now all of that was almost over. Neb finally felt the first touch of true fear.

‘You all know your roles,’ Buzz continued. He stood ramrod straight, his blue eyes moving from one person to the next. Even his short gray hair seemed to stand to attention. ‘We’re going to have one last review from box to boots.’

That was Buzz’s own phrase, to mean the entire mission. By ‘boots’ he meant boots on the ground in the Game. By ‘box’, he meant the cargo crate they were permitted to bring under the Game’s rules. It was two meters long, one meter high and one meter wide, exactly as specified. There had been a huge team of armorers, weapons experts, engineers, designers, ethnographers, game theorists, user experience researchers, senior staff and lawyers assigned to it, obsessing over every detail. Each object it would hold had been custom-designed to fit without leaving a cubic millimeter of wasted space. Heavy weapons systems, rifles, ammunition, first aid, survival equipment, night vision, extra clothing, emergency rations, shields, sensing equipment, comms -- every atom had been fought over by an army of engineers and bureaucrats and planners.

In the briefing, Buzz talked about everything they would bring, where they would sit on the gamejumper, and what their plans were for different arrival scenarios. Neb had seen it all before countless times to the point it felt etched on his soul. Instant hostile action? Everyone out of the transport with metapolymer shields from the crate deployed, Meathead and Mallory up front with the heavy weapons, Neb bringing up the rear. Non-hostile contact? Everyone out of the transport with shields deployed but now with Buzz up front, Anna on his right, Meathead on his left, everyone else immediately behind, Neb bringing up the rear. Urban environment? Anna and Jasper up front, then Buzz, then Meathead and Mallory, then Neb bringing up the rear. In pretty much all of their scenarios -- of which there were very, very many -- Neb was bringing up the rear. ‘Don’t worry, Doc,’ Mallory had said to him one day. ‘Maybe we’ll land in a library.’ Neb had just raised his middle finger as the others laughed, and Mallory had smiled sweetly.

‘Okay, then,’ Buzz said at last. The briefing had stretched on for almost three hours. He sat back in his chair. ‘That’s it.’ He looked from each person to the next. Suddenly there was no tiredness in the room, no long-meeting lethargy. Just an electric anticipation.

Buzz said: ‘Get ready for Game time.’