The Game team gathered in the forward viewing bay to watch the final approach to Earth Gate, standing shoulder to shoulder. Somewhere deep in the Gate’s launch tunnel was the transport craft that would take them to the Game. Since humankind had first been invited to play, over 350 years ago, almost five hundred people had made this journey before them. No-one had ever come back. 

Arvic Nebuchadnezzar James stood at one end of the line of soldiers, his heart beating hard. The others played it cool but he did not try to hide his wonder. The Gate loomed enormously through the viewport, a complex geometric structure of curving arcs that linked and touched and meshed in an almost organic near-symmetry. The launch tunnel cut through the structure as if it had been bored by a great drill, the only straight lines in the whole vast construction. 

The Gate was a gift left behind by an ultra-advanced and long-departed civilization called the Main. It gave humanity access to the stars far earlier than they would otherwise have achieved, and it introduced them to the Cluster, a group of more than a thousand other civilizations. Each civilization had gone through the same jaw-dropping process of discovering their own Gate. Once the civilisation had the capability to travel a light-year or so away from their home planet, the Gate decloaked and transmitted its first messages. Neb had dreamed of seeing the Earth Gate all his life, and now it was happening, the experience felt somehow unreal.  

The Gate was quite an incredible gift, but the Cluster itself was a brutal world. Relations between the Cluster civilizations were ruthless, held together by a fragile system of rules and alliances that were both frequently broken. The Gate network brought not just culture and commerce, but war. Many people on Earth wished it had never revealed itself. 

And along with the Gates, the Main had left the Game. 

The Game was held once every five years, and each of the Cluster civs was invited to send seven representatives. Humanity had first been invited 355 years previously, and had entered every edition of the Game since then. So 497 people had made this journey before Neb and team, and none had ever returned. As far as anyone on Earth knew, no-one from any other Cluster civ had ever come back, either. And because the Game invitation transmitted by the Gate contained no information other than the logistics of travel and equipment, almost nothing about the Game was known: where it was held, what it was like, how it was played, what the prize was, or whether there even was a prize. The invitation essentially just said: If you want to enter, this is how you enter.

And of course, everyone did want to enter. It was widely thought -- without a shred of evidence -- that the prize for ‘winning’ the Game, whatever that might mean, was access to more advanced Main tech. And in the viper pit of the Cluster, that could mean the difference between existence and obliteration. 

The possibility of better Main tech was certainly more than enough for EarthCom to justify a few dead soldiers every five years. However, the complete lack of success at the Game to date was concerning, and so this time around the EarthCom brass had decided to try something different. They were including Neb in the Game team, the only one of the crew who was not a former special teams soldier. He was a military academic, specializing in Main xeno-archaeology. Neb’s inclusion had produced much complaining from the other soldiers, and led to several formal letters of protest. But EarthCom held firm. Neb knew that the others would swap him for a real soldier in a heartbeat, but on the other hand, as he tried to reassure himself, it wasn’t like the 71 previous all-hardass crews had been a resounding success. 

Neb had been obsessed with the Main his whole life. He had been asking questions about them since he was old enough to ask questions. The fact that there were so few answers just made him more curious, not less. At age seventeen he had applied to his local council for an academic scholarship, and by chance at that time the military were forming an exploratory team of soldier-academics. If he signed up, it would mean a full ride through his education in return for a 20-year commitment. Was he interested? He had signed the papers the same day.

Now he looked down along the line of soldiers in the viewing bay, the bright light from the Gate lighting up their faces. He had spent every day of the last two years with this crew, in a regime of physical and mental training more intense than he could possibly have imagined. And yet, he knew almost nothing about them as people. There was no rule that said the team could not talk about their past or why they had signed up for the Game, but there might as well have been. 

At the far end of the line were Meathead and Mallory, heavy weapons specialists. Each of the men was in the range of three hundred pounds, touching six and a half feet tall. And yet Neb knew how fast and agile they could be when they needed to. They were born-in-the-blood warriors -- they lived for combat and preparing for combat. Even after all the time the team had spent together, Neb found them both intimidating. Neither was shy to express their disapproval at his inclusion.

Next in line was Buzz, team commander. He was about sixty, flinty tough, unyielding, uncompromising, deeply experienced, as strong and fit as a much younger man. It was easy to see why he had been chosen for the leadership role. And of course Buzz, like the rest of them, had the great advantage of actually being willing to go to the Game when push came to shove. For older soldiers looking for a post-military career, it sounded great in a stump speech to say that they had faced near-certain death. But actually facing it was quite a bit less popular. If the Game team was successful at the Game, it would be the crowning achievement of Buzz’s long career. And if they weren’t, well…The team knew that for Buzz, glorious death in battle was almost as good as glorious victory. 

Beside Buzz was Anna, his second in command. Her perfect, angular features were unreadable as ever. She was not much over 30, but she had already been all over Earthspace on classified inter-civ dark ops. She was fast and agile and restless. In their hand-to-hand combat training, Neb had noted, even Meathead and Mallory were wary of her.

Next to Anna was Jasper. He was almost as good looking as Anna was, and Meathead sometimes teased him -- when Anna was not present, of course -- that he and Anna had been selected only for future recruitment posters. Of all of them, Jasper had been kindest to Neb, most tolerant of the gaps in his military skills, most willing to answer a quiet question and keep the mockery to a minimum.  

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Last was Grey. She was a little older than Anna, a solid and reassuring presence in a way that Anna was not. Grey was an expert in long-range engagements, and she had picked up a long list of other skills over the years. There was something a little sad about her, Neb thought, as if she had seen just a little too much. Or understood too much, perhaps. 

But Neb was just speculating. He knew hardly anything about any of them. Throughout their training the team stayed locked in the present, pushing through days of training that were almost unbearably long and intense. 

Mallory was gazing out the viewport at the Gate, looking somewhat unimpressed. ‘It’s certainly pretty fucking big,’ he said.

‘It looks like somebody dropped it and it’s kind of broken,’ Jasper answered. Neb smiled. It did look like that. The curves and asymmetries of the design were very different to how humans built things.

Their ship turned away from the Gate, their view panning over the vast structure until the human-built habitat came into view. The habitat was made of pure white exopolymer, the pinnacle of human engineering, and was shaped like two pyramids joined at the base. It was lined at intervals with the explosive green of plant life growing in translucent tubes, giving it a quasi-organic look. The habitat would be their home for the last night before the Game. 

The fear of the Game was still a distant thing for Neb, almost abstract. When he had been accepted for the mission, the danger was overshadowed by the thrill of getting closer to the Main than any other Earth scholar in history ever had. And even now, looking at the reality of the Gate, all he felt was excitement. The fucking Main, he thought. How had they done it? How had they created such a vast and unfathomably powerful piece of technology? 

Neb had studied the Earth Gate in depth, and knew every phase of its operation by heart. When it was activated, energy glowed at the intersections of the arcs and formed a mesh of spheres of light. The mesh grew until it became a vast sphere of intense, pure whiteness, like a supernova that had somehow been stopped at the instant of its explosion. Then the sphere collapsed inwards and any ship in the launch tunnel disappeared in a painfully bright expulsion of multidimensional energy, a great beam that reached out into space and faded away. The ship reappeared almost instantly at the target Gate somewhere else in the network. After a brief cool-down period, the Earth Gate was ready to use again.

There was naturally a tremendous amount of curiosity among Earth’s scientists and engineers as to how the Gate actually worked. Yet even after three centuries of study, they were no closer to understanding the underlying tech. All they had were a bunch of conflicting theories.

As for the Main themselves, all that was known for certain about them was that they had existed for at least several million years, they had reached astonishing levels of civilisational capability, and then they had disappeared. Some people believed they had been obliterated by an even greater power. But most Main scholars thought they had voluntarily left the stage. Often, this group said the Main had ‘ascended’, which implied a certain understanding of the process, and indeed a direction of travel. But ascended to where, or from where, or to what end, or by what means -- the answers to these questions, as almost all others, were utterly unknown. 

What was incontrovertible, though, was that the Main had set things up exactly as they wanted before they disappeared. They had left the Gates, waiting patiently and invisibly for their recipient civilisations to be ready to use them. They had left a smattering of xeno-archaeological sites, sometimes with semi-intelligent systems to provide limited information about their use. And they had left the Game. 

The Game. It took a powerful hold over people. The lure of the potentially deadly unknown was very hard for a certain kind of person to resist. Neb found himself staring at Buzz. The commander was close to the end of his career -- he could retire to a small village somewhere, drink good wine, eat good food, tell tales of his old glories. Why was he doing any of this? 

Neb almost jumped when Buzz turned and stared right back at him. The commander’s eyes were light blue and penetrating, and he did not mind staring at a person far beyond the point they found it uncomfortable. 

‘Getting some jitters, Doc?’ he asked, and Neb willed himself not to look away. But his eyes dropped as if on their own accord, and he looked back out the viewport.

‘No, sir,’ he said quietly. 

Mallory snorted. ‘The Doc got jitters when we were leaving fucking Earth,’ he said. There were snickers. Neb had indeed flinched when the engines of the ship-jumper taking them off Earth had roared to full power and flung them out of the planet’s gravity well. He had never been off-world before, and when the acceleration spiked he had made a small frightened noise, hardly more than a little grunt. He had immediately closed his eyes in regret. Mallory had not let him forget it. 

The team remained at the viewport until the docking bay of the habitat opened smoothly and silently in front of them, like a great square mouth. 

‘All right,’ said Buzz. ‘Let’s get moving.’

They were walking back towards their shared quarters when Buzz’s hand landed heavily on Neb’s shoulder, making him jump. The commander squeezed inquisitively. Buzz had been worried about Neb’s physical conditioning since the beginning, and had assigned him extra gym work with Meathead, who had taken much delight in the duty. It had been grim. There had been plenty of frustrated tears of silent agony from Neb in the washroom afterwards, in fleeting moments of aloneness. But he had not once complained. He knew he needed it, and he was now in the best shape of his life, even if the others seemed to think he was still weak to the point of death.

‘Doc,’ Buzz said. ‘A word?’

‘Of course, sir.’ They broke away from the flow of the group, and Buzz paused until the others had moved on.

‘Once we take the transport into the Game, this bunch of animals is going to hit fight or flight,’ Buzz said, when they were out of earshot. ‘And they don’t do flight. You understand me?’

‘Yes, sir,’ Neb replied.

‘You’ll need to keep your head down, is what I’m telling you,’ Buzz continued. ‘Preserving our academic liaison is not going to be high on the list of priorities.’

Neb gave no outward sign of irritation, but mentally he gritted his teeth. He was a fully-fledged member of the crew, same as the rest of them. But if Buzz and the gang insisted on calling him ‘Doc’ and the ‘academic liaison’, well… fuck them. There wasn’t much he could do about it. 

‘Understood, sir,’ he said.

‘Good.’ Buzz gripped hard on his shoulder again, but Neb was ready for it and didn’t flinch. ‘For what it’s worth, Doc, I’m glad you’re with us,’ Buzz added. ‘Now get your shit and get to the shuttle bay.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Neb said. He tried to hide his surprise. This was, as far as he could recall, the first positive thing Buzz had ever said to him. 

He hurried on to catch up with the others, leaving the commander standing there in the corridor, a shadowy figure in the dim light.