Prologue: Naya Thikana

The tank rattled over ground that had never been touched by human feet, and I sat on top of it like a king on the world's least comfortable throne, watching a planet I barely understood roll past beneath a sky I couldn't name the colour of.

Not blue. Not quite purple. Something in between — the particular shade that this moon produced at midday when its parent gas giant hung low on the horizon and the atmosphere filtered the starlight through layers of alien chemistry that no textbook on Earth had ever described. I'd been staring at that sky for a month now and I still couldn't find the right word for it. Ira would have called it "strategically irrelevant." Chandni would have called it "boring." Bhavana would have looked at it for ten minutes without speaking and then said something so quietly precise that the rest of us would feel stupid for not seeing it first.

My name is Karthik Agnihotri. Second Lieutenant, Indian origin, human species, currently leading a squad of seven through a war that was also a game that was also, depending on how philosophical you got about it, a cosmic joke being played on every sentient species in the galaxy by whatever entity had designed this system. The War Game. Capital letters. The kind of name that sounded like it had been chosen by a committee of gods who thought subtlety was for lesser beings.

The basics: every species in the galaxy had been drafted. Not volunteered — drafted. One day the sky opened up, people disappeared, and the next thing they knew they were in Basic Training on a space station, being told that they were now soldiers in a game that determined territorial control, resource allocation, and — if you read between the lines of the official documentation, which I had, because I was the kind of person who read between lines even when the lines themselves were already terrifying — survival. Win, and your species gets planets, moons, resources. Lose, and your species gets absorbed, relocated, or — the documentation was deliberately vague on this point — eliminated.

I had four lives. That was my current count. In the Game, death was not permanent until you ran out of lives, at which point death became extremely permanent. I'd started with three, earned extras through leveling and achievements, lost one in a Battle Royale that I still had nightmares about, and was currently sitting at four, which felt simultaneously like a lot and not nearly enough.

The tank — Savitri's tank, technically, since she was the only one certified to drive it and the only one crazy enough to want to — crested a ridge and the landscape opened up beneath us. Highlands. Mountains in the distance with snow-capped peaks that looked like they'd been painted by someone who'd never seen real mountains and had to work from descriptions: too perfect, too symmetrical, the kind of mountains that existed in screensavers and travel brochures and the imagination of a game designer who valued aesthetics over geological accuracy.

"Karthik bhai." Chandni's voice from inside the tank, muffled by metal and distance and the particular acoustic properties of a military vehicle that had been designed for combat rather than conversation. "Pramod wants to know if you want chai. He's got the portable stove going."

Of course Pramod had the portable stove going. Pramod — ex-military, Punjabi, built like a refrigerator with opinions — had been the first person to establish priorities when we'd been assigned to this moon, and those priorities were, in order: (1) chai, (2) food, (3) defensible positions, (4) everything else. "A soldier who hasn't had chai," Pramod had declared on our first day, with the particular authority of a man who considered this statement to be on par with constitutional law, "is not a soldier. He is a hostage."

"Send it up," I called down.

The chai arrived via Rukmini, who climbed the tank's exterior with the efficiency of a woman who had been climbing things since she was a child in Madurai and who regarded the tank's vertical surface as a minor inconvenience rather than an obstacle. She handed me the steel glass — Pramod insisted on steel glasses, having rejected the Game-provided plastic cups with the particular disdain of a man who believed that chai served in plastic was not chai but an insult — and sat beside me on the tank's roof.

"Ira has the coordinates locked," Rukmini said. She was my second-in-command, and she communicated the way she did everything: with precision, economy, and the implicit understanding that unnecessary words were a form of inefficiency that she was not prepared to tolerate. "Six hours to the site. The satellite shows clear terrain — no hostiles, no Game-spawned monsters in the immediate area."

"What about the not-immediate area?"

"Three clusters of what the satellite classifies as 'fauna, hostile, level range 8-12.' Nothing we can't handle. Savitri wants to run them over."

"Savitri always wants to run things over."

"It's efficient," Rukmini said, which was the closest thing to a joke that Rukmini produced, and which I had learned to recognise as humour only after six months of serving with her.

I drank the chai. Ginger and tulsi — Pramod's signature blend, adapted for space with whatever local herbs he could find that approximated the originals. It wasn't perfect. It was never perfect. But it was warm and it was chai and it was made by a man who cared about the making, and in a galaxy where everything was strange and nothing was home, the imperfect chai was the closest thing to home that any of us had.

The month since we'd taken the moon had been — the word I kept coming back to was "earned." We'd earned this peace. My squad and I had cleared three dungeons, defeated a Game-spawned army, and converted an entire moon into a human holding, which was the kind of achievement that military history would remember and that my body remembered differently: in the aches, the scars, the particular way my left shoulder clicked when I raised my arm above my head, the souvenir of a fight with a creature that had been half-spider and half-nightmare and entirely too fast.

Central Command — the human military hierarchy, headquartered on a space station that orbited the system's main planet — had rewarded us with a new assignment. Build a colony. Establish resource extraction. Defend the position. The reward for doing the impossible was, apparently, being asked to do it again.

"Character sheet," I said to the air, triggering the Game's interface. The translucent display appeared in my vision — the stats, the skills, the inventory, the particular gamification of my existence that I had stopped finding surreal and had started finding useful:

Karthik Agnihotri

Rank: Second Lieutenant

Race: Human

Lives: 4

Class: Junior Hero

Secondary Class: Platoon Leader

Level: 14

The stats scrolled: Strength 35, Reflexes 28, Stamina 32, Magic 49, Willpower 27, Recovery 41. Numbers that meant something in the Game's logic and that translated, in practice, to the difference between surviving a fight and not surviving it. My Magic was my highest stat — a surprise for a man who had, on Earth, been studying engineering at Pune University and who had considered magic to be the province of films and grandmothers' stories. In the Game, magic was mathematics. Spells were equations. And I was, it turned out, very good at equations.

I dismissed the display. The tank rolled on. The mountains grew larger. Somewhere ahead was the site where we'd build our colony — a place that would become home for however many humans Central Command decided to send us, a place that my squad would defend with the particular stubbornness of people who had already built one impossible thing and who were not going to let anyone take it from them.

Bhavana's voice, quiet, from inside the tank: "The terrain ahead changes. Valley floor. River system. Good water access."

"And the bad news?" I asked, because Bhavana always delivered good news first, followed by the qualification that made the good news conditional.

"The valley floor is a swamp."

Of course it was. The Game had a sense of humour. It wasn't a good sense of humour — it was the particular humour of an entity that found human suffering entertaining and that expressed its amusement through terrain selection — but it was consistent.

"A swamp," Chandni said, appearing through the top hatch with the particular energy of a woman who had been cooped up inside a tank for too long and who regarded confinement as a personal insult. "You're telling me that Central Command, in their infinite wisdom, has assigned us to build a colony in a swamp."

"Think of it as a challenge," I said.

"I think of it as a punishment. What did we do wrong?"

"We succeeded. In the military, success is punished with more responsibility. It's the system's way of ensuring that competent people are always exhausted and incompetent people are always comfortable."

"That's the most Indian thing you've ever said, bhai."

It probably was. But the tank kept rolling, and the swamp kept approaching, and somewhere in the distance, in a sky that was the colour I couldn't name, the future was waiting for us with the particular patience of something that knew we were coming and that had already decided what it was going to do to us when we arrived.

The chai was getting cold. I drank it anyway. Cold chai was still chai. And we had a colony to build.