Chapter 5: Shikar

We moved at dawn.

The squad — minus Pramod, who stayed to manage the colony, and Ira, who ran satellite overwatch from the Town Centre — assembled at the east gate. Seven of us: me, Rukmini, Chandni, Bhavana, Savitri in the tank, Neelam (who had insisted, and whose Energy Lance made the insistence strategically sound), and Winona, because Winona needed combat experience and because bringing a low-level recruit on a high-stakes mission was either bold leadership or reckless stupidity, and I had decided it was the former.

"The camp is eleven miles northeast," I briefed, standing on the tank's hull. The morning air was thin and cold — the particular chill of this moon's dawn, when the gas giant blocked the sunlight and the temperature dropped to something that felt like a Pune December if Pune December involved alien swamps and the promise of violence. "Six to eight hostiles, entrenched for at least two weeks. They know our patrol patterns, our defenses, our routines. They do not know that we know about them."

"Surprise is our advantage," Rukmini said.

"Surprise is our only advantage. Their levels are unknown. Their equipment is unknown. The terrain favors them — they chose the camp location, which means they've mapped the approaches and probably set traps or early warning systems."

"What's the plan?" Chandni asked, with the particular eagerness of a woman who asked about plans the way other people asked about dessert menus.

"Bhavana scouts ahead. She's our eyes. Savitri positions the tank two miles from the camp — close enough for fire support, far enough to avoid detection. The rest of us approach on foot, using the river for cover. Bhavana identifies their positions. We engage on my signal."

"Rules of engagement?"

"Capture if possible. The scout — the one who killed Murphy — I want alive. Intelligence is priority. But if they engage first, we respond with everything we have."

"Everything includes Munna Junior?" Chandni held up a portable turret — a smaller, deployable version that she had built from spare parts and the Game's crafting system. She had named it Munna Junior, because of course she had.

"Everything includes Munna Junior."

The tank rolled. We moved through the swamp's edge, following the route that Bhavana had mapped — a path that avoided the softest ground and the densest vegetation, winding northeast through terrain that was becoming, as we moved further from Haven, wilder. The Game-spawned creatures here were higher level — swan-lizards that were larger, more aggressive, their scales darker, their territorial displays more elaborate. We avoided them. The mission was the camp. Everything else was distraction.

Bhavana moved ahead. She disappeared into the terrain the way water disappeared into sand — not dramatically, not with the cinematic vanishing of a film's hero. She simply walked forward and then she wasn't there anymore, absorbed by the vegetation and the shadows and the particular stillness that was her defining skill. Bhavana could be invisible when she chose to be. Not Game-invisible — not a skill or a spell. Human-invisible. The invisibility of a person who understood terrain and movement and the particular psychology of observation, who knew that the eye tracked motion and colour and that the absence of both was the most effective camouflage ever invented.

We reached the two-mile mark. Savitri positioned the tank on a rocky hillside with clear sightlines to the northeast — the direction of the camp, the direction from which we expected trouble.

"I can put a shell on their campfire from here," Savitri said, checking the tank's rangefinder. "If they have a campfire. If they don't, I can put a shell on whatever they have instead."

"Hold fire until I call it."

"Holding. But my finger is itchy."

"Your finger is always itchy."

"That's why I drive a tank. Itchy fingers and heavy ordnance — a match made in engineering."

The approach on foot took forty minutes. The terrain was dense — forest that grew thicker as we moved away from the swamp, the trees taller, the undergrowth heavier, the particular claustrophobia of a forest that did not want to be walked through and that expressed its displeasure through roots and thorns and branches that reached for your face with the enthusiasm of a relative you hadn't visited in too long.

Bhavana's voice came through the communicator, barely above a whisper: "I have eyes on the camp. Six confirmed. Two more possible — there are two structures I can't see into. The camp is built into a rock formation, natural cover on three sides. Single approach from the south. They have sentries — one on a tree platform, one on the ground, rotating on a fifteen-minute cycle."

"Equipment?"

"Armed. Energy weapons, blade weapons. The one on the tree platform has what looks like a communications array. If that's their transmission equipment, destroying it prevents them from calling for reinforcement."

"Can you reach the communications array?"

"Not without being seen. The tree platform has clear sightlines in every direction. The sentry is alert."

"What about Neelam's Energy Lance? Range?"

Neelam responded, her voice the controlled calm of a person who had done this before: "My lance has a two-hundred-metre effective range. If I can get a clear line from the south approach, I can hit the communications array. But the shot will announce our presence."

"Then the shot is the signal. Neelam takes the array. Chandni deploys Munna Junior on the southern approach for suppressive fire. Bhavana takes the tree sentry — one shot, silent, before the lance fires. Rukmini, Winona, with me on the ground assault. We push in from the south the moment the lance fires."

"And if they run?"

"They run into the tank's engagement zone. Savitri, you hear the lance, you start firing at anything moving northeast."

"With pleasure."

The positioning took twenty minutes. Twenty minutes of moving through forest without making sound, placing bodies in locations that maximised advantage, the particular chess of combat positioning where every metre mattered and every second of patience was an investment in the violence that would follow.

Bhavana's position: elevated, thirty metres east of the camp, with a clear shot at the tree sentry. She communicated her readiness with a single click on the communicator — the particular efficiency of a person who had reduced communication to its minimum viable expression.

Neelam's position: south approach, two hundred metres from the camp, prone behind a fallen tree, the Energy Lance — a weapon that looked like a staff made of compressed light — extended and aimed at the communications array on the tree platform.

Chandni's position: forty metres south, behind a rock formation, Munna Junior deployed and aimed at the camp's entrance, the portable turret's auto-targeting system locked on the approach and ready to fire at anything that crossed its field.

My position: with Rukmini and Winona, fifty metres south, the three of us crouched behind dense undergrowth, weapons ready, the particular tension of the moment before violence — the moment where your body was simultaneously completely still and completely prepared to move, the duality that combat demanded and that never got easier no matter how many times you experienced it.

"On my mark," I said.

I counted. Three. Two. One.

"Mark."

Three things happened simultaneously.

Bhavana's shot — silent, precise, the sniper round crossing thirty metres in a fraction of a second — hit the tree sentry in the chest. The Gumalagian jerked, slumped, and fell from the platform in a cascade of pixels that the Game generated when a creature took lethal damage.

Neelam's Energy Lance fired. The lance was — the sound was wrong for a weapon. Not a bang, not a crack. A hum that built to a shriek, the particular frequency of concentrated energy being released in a focused beam. The beam hit the communications array on the tree platform and the array exploded — not in fire but in light, the components disintegrating into the Game's pixel effect, the transmission equipment reduced to nothing in a single shot.

Chandni's turret opened up. Munna Junior — despite being portable, despite being smaller than its full-sized siblings — produced a volume of fire that was, by any reasonable measure, excessive. Energy bursts sprayed the camp's entrance, chewing through vegetation and rock and anything that was unfortunate enough to be standing in the field of fire.

The Gumalagians reacted. Fast — faster than human soldiers, the particular speed of a species that was built for ambush and response, whose reflexes were evolved rather than trained. Four of them emerged from the camp's structures — big, armoured, the green-black-yellow colouring that I'd seen in the Battle Royale, the scales catching the filtered light and redirecting it in patterns that made them hard to track visually. They returned fire immediately, energy weapons sending bright bolts toward Chandni's position, toward the south approach, toward the tree line where Bhavana had fired from.

"Move!" I shouted, and we moved. Rukmini, Winona, and I broke from cover and charged the camp's south entrance. The entrance was a gap in the rock formation — three metres wide, flanked by boulders, the particular geography of a chokepoint that was simultaneously our approach and their kill zone.

Rukmini went first. She moved with the fluid precision of a woman who had been trained by the Indian Armed Forces before the draft and whose muscle memory was not Game-enhanced but Earth-forged, the particular competence of a soldier who had done this in training a thousand times and who did it now for real with the same mechanical efficiency. She fired as she moved — short bursts, controlled, the energy carbine punching holes in the cover that the Gumalagians were using.

I followed. My sword appeared in my left hand, my pistol in my right — the dual-wielding configuration that the Hero class enabled and that I had practised until the weight of both weapons felt like extensions of my arms rather than objects I was carrying. The pistol fired. The sword was for close range. And close range was coming fast.

A Gumalagian emerged from behind a boulder, three metres away. Close enough to see the individual scales on its face. Close enough to smell it — the particular scent of a reptilian species, dry and mineral, like sun-heated stone. It swung a blade — a curved, single-edged weapon that moved with the speed of a creature whose reflexes exceeded mine by a statistical margin that the Game tracked and that I preferred not to think about.

I blocked with the sword. The impact jarred my arm — the strength behind the blow was significant, more than I'd expected from a scout-class operative. This wasn't a scout. This was a fighter.

My pistol came up. Point-blank. I fired three times. The Gumalagian staggered back, the energy bolts punching through its armour at a range where armour was a suggestion rather than a defense. It fell. Pixels began to cascade.

"Karthik!" Winona's voice — high, sharp, the particular pitch of a person who was seeing combat for the first time and who was simultaneously terrified and functional. I turned. Another Gumalagian had flanked us, coming around the rock formation's western edge, a route we hadn't anticipated because the satellite hadn't shown a western exit.

Winona fired. Her starter rifle — underpowered, underleveled, the weapon equivalent of bringing a cricket bat to a war — barked twice. The shots hit the Gumalagian in the shoulder. Not lethal. Not even close to lethal. But the shots did something more important than damage: they announced that the flank was covered, that someone was there, that the easy kill the Gumalagian had expected was not going to be easy.

The Gumalagian turned toward Winona. I cast Telekinesis. The spell — new, unpractised, the magical equivalent of a tool I'd only used in the workshop and never in the field — grabbed the Gumalagian and threw it. Not gracefully. Not with the precision that the spell would eventually achieve. I threw it sideways, into the rock formation's wall, with enough force that the impact produced a sound like a bag of gravel being dropped from a height.

Rukmini finished it. Two shots. Clean. The pixels cascaded.

The fight lasted four minutes. Four minutes that felt like forty, the particular time dilation of combat where seconds stretched and the body operated at a frequency that the mind could barely track. When it was over, five Gumalagians were dead and one was alive — the one that Bhavana had dropped from the tree, who had survived the fall and the subsequent bullet because Bhavana had aimed for non-vital areas, because I had asked for a prisoner and Bhavana delivered what was asked for.

The prisoner was — I approached it carefully, sword drawn, Rukmini covering with her carbine — the prisoner was the scout. The one who had killed Murphy. I knew because the blade on its belt matched the wound pattern that Bhavana had catalogued, and because the Game's identification system confirmed it: Gumalagian Shadow Scout, Level 17.

Level 17. Higher than my squad's average. Higher than me. The scout had been operating in our territory, observing our defenses, killing our people, and it had been higher level than the people defending those defenses. The statistical unfairness of it was — I pushed the thought aside. Statistics were for after the fight. During the fight and immediately after, the only relevant number was the one that mattered: we were alive, and most of them were not.

"You're the one who killed my soldier," I said.

The Gumalagian — injured, one arm broken from the fall, the green-black scales dull with pain — looked at me with eyes that were yellow, slitted, and entirely without remorse.

"Little pink food," it hissed. "Don't you know to respect your betters?"

"When I meet one, I'll keep that in mind."

"You're making a mistake. We're going to kill all of you."

"So there's more of you."

The eyes narrowed. The particular narrowing of a creature that had said too much and that knew it had said too much and that was processing the tactical error with the speed of a species that did not forgive mistakes, even its own.

"Now who made the mistake?" I said.

We had our prisoner. We had our intelligence. The communications array was destroyed. The camp was empty.

But somewhere — beyond the eleven-mile radius, beyond the satellite's reach, somewhere in the vast, unnamed territory of a moon that was ours by conquest and theirs by grudge — somewhere, more of them were coming.