Chapter 10: Gaddar

The evidence was in the comms log.

I found it at 0200 — not because I was looking for it, but because I couldn't sleep. The Vana-Raja attack had left a residue in my nervous system, a low-frequency hum of alertness that the Game's Recovery stat couldn't fully smooth away. So I'd gone to the comms shed — the small wooden building behind Bhrigu's administration block, the one that housed the colony's communication array — to review the sensor data from the attack, looking for patterns in the Vanachari swarm's approach that might help us predict future assaults.

What I found instead was a transmission log that shouldn't have existed.

The colony's comms array was simple — a standard Kendra Sena communications package, capable of intra-system messaging and, with sufficient power, inter-system relay through the hyperspace beacon network. All transmissions were logged automatically — incoming and outgoing, timestamped, tagged with the sender's identification code. The system was supposed to be access-restricted: only Bhrigu, as administrator, and myself, as garrison commander, had authorization to use the array for external communications.

The log showed a transmission at 0147 — thirteen minutes before the Vana-Raja attack — on an encrypted channel that I didn't recognize. The sender ID was masked, which was itself a red flag: masking required a Comms Override skill at Level 2 or higher, and in our squad, only one person had that skill.

Kunwar Pratap.

I stared at the log. The encrypted channel's destination was — my HUD's cryptographic tools were basic, but sufficient for this — a relay node in the inner systems. Not a military node. A private relay. The kind used by intelligence operatives, black-market dealers, and people who needed their communications to be untraceable by standard Kendra Sena monitoring.

The transmission itself was encrypted — I couldn't read the content. But the timing was impossible to ignore. Thirteen minutes before an attack that had been suspiciously well-coordinated. An attack that had targeted our weakest point with precision that required intelligence — specific intelligence about which wall sections were original prefab and which were reinforced.

Intelligence that someone inside the colony had provided.

I sat in the comms shed, the green glow of the terminal painting my face, the jungle's night chorus filtering through the walls — the sitar-string howl of distant Vanachari, the deeper throb of insects, the occasional crack of a branch under the weight of something large moving through the canopy. The terminal hummed. The log blinked.

Kunwar.

The man who had been transferred twice for "interpersonal difficulties." The man whose sharpness I had noted and filed under "asset." The man who was always quiet, always competent, always exactly where he was supposed to be, performing exactly as expected — the perfect soldier, which, I now realized, was exactly what a spy would look like.

I didn't confront him immediately. The Savior Complex skill pulled at me — the urge to act, to protect, to confront the threat before it could harm my people — but Ira's voice, the rational counterweight, was loud in my memory: think before you hero. Confronting Kunwar without proof would accomplish nothing. He'd deny it. The encrypted content was inaccessible. And if he was reporting to someone — the private relay suggested an intelligence handler, not a casual contact — then alerting him would alert his handler, and the handler would adapt.

I needed to be smarter than my instincts.

"You're up early," Ira said. She was leaning against the comms shed doorframe — how long she'd been there, I had no idea. The Reconnaissance specialist's talent for appearing without announcement was, in this moment, both reassuring and slightly unnerving.

"How much did you see?" I asked.

"Enough." She crossed to the terminal, her bare feet silent on the wooden floor — she'd come from the barracks without boots, the quick-response habit of a soldier who prioritized speed over comfort. She studied the log. Her eyes — chai-coloured, sharp — moved across the data with the particular speed of a person who processed information the way most people processed breathing. "Encrypted channel. Masked sender. Timestamp thirteen minutes before the attack."

"Kunwar."

"Kunwar." She didn't sound surprised. She sounded — I looked at her — confirmed. "I've been watching him. Since the jungle patrol — the first one. His positioning was always slightly off. Not wrong — just slightly off, the way a person positions themselves when they're maintaining a secondary objective that they don't want observed. He was mapping our patrol routes while we patrolled. Filing the information for later use."

"You didn't tell me."

"I didn't have evidence. Gut feelings aren't operational intelligence." She tapped the log. "This is."

"I can't read the content."

"No. But I can track the relay destination." Her fingers moved on the terminal — faster than mine could, the Comms Override skill not in her class abilities but the Reconnaissance specialist's general intelligence compensating through sheer analytical capacity. "The private relay routes through three nodes before reaching its final destination. I can trace the first two. The third is behind a military-grade encryption wall that I can't crack without higher-level tools."

"What do the first two nodes tell us?"

"They tell us the communication is being routed through Kendra Sena intelligence infrastructure. Not standard military comms. Intelligence. Specifically, the branch that handles internal security — the people who monitor threats within Manavata, not threats from external enemies."

The implication settled like cold water in my stomach. Kunwar wasn't reporting to the Gulmarg. He wasn't selling intelligence to an external enemy. He was reporting to Manavata's own intelligence service — the branch of the Kendra Sena that existed to monitor, control, and when necessary, eliminate problems within the human faction.

Problems like me.

"They put a spy in my squad," I said.

"They put a spy in your squad," Ira confirmed. "And whoever's receiving Kunwar's reports used the intelligence to coordinate the Vana-Raja attack — not directly, but by ensuring our defensive weaknesses were known to threats in the area. They didn't send the Vanachari. They just made sure the Vanachari knew where to hit."

"That's — " I searched for the word. "That's attempted murder through wildlife management."

"It's the Kendra Sena. They have a long tradition of arranging deaths that look like accidents. A garrison overrun by local fauna on an underresourced moon? Tragic. Inevitable. Not anyone's fault."

I sat with it. The anger was — I could feel my Willpower stat straining, the emotion pressing against the stat's containment like steam in a closed vessel. The Kendra Sena hadn't just sent me to a cage. They'd sent me to a killing floor. And they'd put one of their people in my squad to make sure the kill happened on schedule.

"What do we do?" I asked.

"We don't confront him. We don't change his access. We don't do anything that signals we know." Ira's voice was calm — the professional calm of a person who dealt in information and understood that information was most powerful when the source didn't know it had been compromised. "We feed him what we want his handlers to know. We control the narrative. And we use his channel — without his knowledge — to monitor what the Kendra Sena is planning."

"Counter-intelligence."

"Counter-intelligence." The faintest smile. "I didn't hack my CO's files because I was bored, Kartik. I hacked them because I'm good at this."

We left the comms shed. The night was warm — the jungle's breath steady and humid, the gas giant hanging overhead like a massive amber lantern, its reflected light casting the colony in the warm, forgiving glow that made everything look more peaceful than it was. The mines glowed faintly in the northern approach — C.J.'s Welcome Mat, dormant but ready.

I looked at the barracks. Behind one of those mesh-covered windows, Kunwar was sleeping. Or pretending to sleep. The man who had eaten our synthesized dal, who had fought beside us against the Vanachari, who had monitored comms and mapped signals and done everything asked of him with quiet competence — while simultaneously reporting our every weakness to people who wanted us dead.

The anger cooled. Not disappeared — cooled, solidified, became something denser and more useful than heat. The Kendra Sena wanted us to fail. They had designed a colony to be a cage, staffed it with rejects, starved it of resources, and planted a spy to ensure that any success could be undermined. And despite all of it — despite the designed failure, the bureaucratic sabotage, the attempted murder-by-wildlife — we were still here. The wall was standing. The squad was growing. The quest was progressing.

They'd sent us here to die. We'd refused. And now we knew they were trying harder.

"We don't tell the others," I said. "Not yet. I don't want the squad dynamic to change. Kunwar needs to believe everything is normal."

"Agreed. But we start controlling what he sees. Ira Kapoor's Counter-Intelligence Operation is officially active." She bumped her shoulder against mine — the familiar gesture, the warmth in the cool night. "This is going to be fun."

"Your definition of fun concerns me."

"Your concern is noted and filed under 'Things Kartik Says Before I'm Proven Right.'"

We went back to the barracks. The bunks were filled with sleeping soldiers — Hemant's deep breathing, C.J.'s restless shifting, Sanjana's absolute stillness, Malhar's occasional muttered engineering equations. And Kunwar — eyes closed, breathing even, the picture of peaceful sleep.

I lay on my bunk. The springs squeaked their familiar complaint. Through the mesh screen, the gas giant's light painted amber rectangles on the floor.

Sleep did not come easily. But when it came, it came with a dream that was not a dream but a plan — the particular plan of a person who had learned that the Game's most dangerous enemies were not the ones in the jungle.