Lieutenant Kazemi scowled as he drank the last cold dregs of his coffee. He set the cup down to the side with one hand while the other was buried in the holomap display in front of him. The 3D map was overlaid with a grid pattern and each grid was labeled. Currently he was trying to find his men.
Tiny icons glowed in the forest band northwest of Alpha Base where tomorrow’s Forest Challenge was due to start—drone telemetry, motion sensors, the ANIP geo-trail Rios had just confirmed an hour before. The capture-the-flag route traced a faint blue line through grids F-12 to H-9, a neat arc of planned chaos.
Kazemi pinched to zoom in on H-9. A short stack of notification markers hovered over the area, each tagged with a timestamp. He flicked one open.
ATTACH: SHIELD FIELD REPORT – Delta-7
STATUS: RECEIVED / INTEGRITY: PASS
The report unrolled in a side pane, crisp blue text over dark:
“…the only issue we've run into is Alvarez and his team are 45 minutes past ETA. We're headed south to meet them.”
Kazemi’s jaw flexed. He read that line again.
“Still no ping?” he asked.
A duty tech at the next console shook her head, eyes never leaving her screens. “Negative, sir. Alvarez’s ANIP transponders dropped off the local repeaters about fifty minutes ago. Last clean fix was here.” She highlighted a patch of trees a couple of kilometers south of the flag clearing. “Grid… G-10, just on the edge of some kind of ravine.”
On the holomap, the highlighted square pulsed a soft, accusing orange.
Kazemi tapped the edge of the console with two fingers. “Microdrones?”
“Rerouted three of the perimeter swarm. Camera feeds went static about twenty meters into that grid. Could be canopy density, could be interference.” She hesitated. “But it is a similar signature to the previous distortion event, sir.”
The same event Rios had politely downplayed in his Analysis section. The same one HEX had waved off as “interesting but non-persistent.”
He could practically hear the SCRY liaison passing the message on, in that smug, smooth corporate voice and perfect hair.
Ops is aware of the issues and has accepted the risk for the sake of the schedule. Christ in a hand basket.
Two days ago he’d signed off on that and now he had one team missing in the field.
Kazemi keyed a channel open. “Ops to Delta-7. Rios, report.”
Static hissed back at him—then the ANIP icon turned amber and a soft chime sounded.
LINK UNAVAILABLE – ROUTING VIA RELAY… FAILED. STANDBY…
He cut the line before the system could suggest troubleshooting steps.
“Try again on local fallback,” he said.
“Already did.” The tech’s voice was quiet now. “No handshake. Either they’re in a dead zone or ANIP is hard-jammed.”
“They don’t have anything that can hard-jam ANIP,” Kazemi muttered. And who the hell was THEY anyway? This was a medieval fucking world; there were no shock troops in the forest here.
He thought about the claw marks recorded on the previous sweep and pulled up the archived imagery: deep gouges high on the trunks, fur samples tagged with a HEX case number that hadn’t resolved into anything comforting. Apex-class, Rios had called it. Ursa Major Major HEX had dubbed it. Could Alvarez have had a run in? Without sending any word?
“Sir?” the tech said. “Producers are asking if we’re green for morning step-off. They want a firm yes for the live schedule.”
Of course they did.
Kazemi zoomed out until the whole course lay spread across the table: the blue trainee route, the pulsing red cluster that marked the boar Sounder, the ghosted icon where Alvarez’s team should have been and the double overlaid circles of Rios and Harker closing in on the location.
He could scrub the challenge. Flag the area red, force a full shutdown. He sighed. Then spend the day tomorrow listening to the furious calls roll down from three levels of command and a dozen sponsors once Alvarez walked back into town and they could figure out why they had dropped off the holomaps.
No, there was no cancelling the show. It must go on. All he could do was stack the deck to make sure everything went smoothly.
“Tell them we’re green,” he said at last. His voice was steady, which felt like a lie. “I want microdrones across the entire section all night. If we see anything bigger than one of those boar, I want to know about it. If Alvarez isn’t online by then, we treat his last known location as hostile and lock it out of the trainee route. It’s off grid to the south anyway, so it should be fine.”
“Yes, sir.”
The tech’s fingers flew across her keyboard, pushing his decision up the chain.
Kazemi watched the map for another long moment, then reached for his empty cup, remembered it was empty, and pushed it aside again.
“Where the hell are you, Alvarez,” he murmured, eyes on that quiet orange square in the trees, “and what the hell did you run into out there?”
***
Back on Earth, managing a roster of security personnel is pretty straightforward compared to the planning and learning that goes into the same job on a new world. The closest equivalent would be moving teams into a new theatre of operations where they’ve never operated before, like a desert, or jungle environment.
But then add fucking monsters.
Things my teams rarely had to deal with on Earth: Teeth, claws, aggressive wildlife.
Things my teams never had to deal with on Earth: Corrosive blood, spatial distortion, reality-adjacent biology, and creatures that shrug off standard ammunition.
At the end of the day, my job doesn’t change. You identify threat vectors, adjust tactics, do what you can to keep your people alive.
But the keeping people alive part has become significantly more difficult in this new world.
We’ve dealt with predators that have natural, phasing camouflage. Swarms of small bird like creatures that seem to share a single distributed intelligence. Plants that paralyze through scent. Monsters the size of RVs. And creatures that I’m not even sure can be killed.
Every playbook we brought with us broke within the first month.
The terrain is alive. The ecosystems are hostile by default. And the apparent existence of magic introduces failure modes we don’t even have language for yet. I had to watch one squad wipe because physics stopped working the way we expected it to. That doesn’t happen on Earth.
The one constant is people.
Panic looks the same whether the threat is a bomb or a basilisk. Leadership matters. Discipline matters. Clear comms matter more than firepower. The teams that survive aren’t the ones with the best gear—they’re the ones that adapt fastest and stop thinking that they’re in any sort of control of this situation.
We don’t win by dominating this world. We survive by respecting how little we understand it, and by making sure the next team knows what not to assume.
That’s the real mission right now.
Everything else is just containment.
After-Action Notes
Lt. Kazemi
SHIELD – Operations Team Command
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