Chapter 1: Daldal

The swamp was worse than the satellite images had suggested, which was saying something, because the satellite images had suggested a nightmare.

We arrived at the site two days after leaving the transport depot. The tank rumbled to a stop at the edge of what should have been solid ground but was, in fact, a gradient — the particular transition from "firm" to "soft" to "actively trying to swallow your boots" that happened so gradually you didn't notice until you were ankle-deep in something that smelled like rotting vegetation and disappointed ambitions.

"This," Chandni said, standing on the tank's roof beside me and surveying the landscape with the expression of a woman who had been promised real estate and delivered a toilet, "is the worst place I have ever seen. And I grew up in Thane during monsoon."

"It has character," I said.

"It has mosquitoes. Alien mosquitoes. I can see them from here."

She wasn't wrong. The swamp stretched in every direction — dark water, twisted trees that looked like they'd given up on growing upward and had settled for growing sideways, patches of what might have been solid ground but probably weren't, and yes, clouds of insects that the Game's identification system helpfully labelled as "Marsh Flies, Level 1, Non-Hostile" but that were, by any reasonable measure, deeply hostile to the concept of human comfort.

Bhavana appeared from inside the tank with the particular silence that was her signature — the ability to materialise beside you without warning, as if she'd been there all along and you'd simply failed to notice. She had her rifle slung over one shoulder and a surveyor's tool that she'd found in the Game's construction menu and that she wielded with the precision of a person who had spent her childhood watching her father survey land in Rajasthan and who had absorbed the skill through the particular osmosis that daughters absorbed things from fathers who talked about their work at dinner.

"The ground is solid enough in two locations," she said, pointing. "Northeast quadrant — elevated ridge, approximately two hundred metres. Southeast — rocky outcrop, smaller but higher. The rest is swamp."

"So we build on the ridge," Rukmini said, because Rukmini's approach to problems was to identify the solution and implement it before the problem had finished introducing itself.

"The ridge is our best option," Bhavana confirmed. "Natural drainage. Access to the river system for water. High enough to avoid flooding during whatever passes for monsoon on this moon."

"Does this moon have monsoons?" I asked.

"The Game's climate data suggests periodic heavy rainfall. Forty-day cycles. We're in day twelve."

"So we have twenty-eight days to build a colony before the sky opens up."

"Twenty-eight days to build shelter, defenses, resource extraction, housing for — " Bhavana consulted her Controller. "Central Command has allocated forty-seven settlers. Thirty-two laborers, fifteen support staff. Arriving in two weeks."

Forty-seven people. My responsibility. Added to the eight already in my squad, that was fifty-five humans who would depend on this swamp becoming livable, this ridge becoming a town, and my decisions becoming the difference between survival and the alternative.

"Alright," I said. "Let's build a colony."

The first day was clearing. Savitri drove the tank through the worst of the swamp vegetation, the treads chewing through alien undergrowth with the mechanical enthusiasm of a machine that did not care what it destroyed as long as the destruction moved it forward. Behind the tank, we followed on foot — Rukmini and I marking the perimeter of what would become the town, Bhavana surveying elevations, Chandni complaining about the mud with the particular eloquence of a woman who had elevated complaining to an art form.

"My boots," Chandni said, pulling one foot from the muck with a sound that was disturbingly organic. "My boots are ruined. These are Game-issued military boots. They are supposed to withstand combat. They are not supposed to smell like this."

"Focus, Chandni."

"I am focused. I am focused on the fact that my boots smell like something died in them. Something died in them, Karthik. Something small and hostile died inside my boots."

"That would be a Marsh Fly. They're attracted to body heat."

"They are attracted to suffering. I am suffering. Therefore: flies."

Ira, who had been working quietly on the construction interface — a Game-provided menu that allowed colony leaders to designate building sites, allocate resources, and manage construction — looked up from her Controller with the particular expression that she wore when she had processed a problem and arrived at a solution and was about to deliver it with the efficiency of a woman who had been managing systems since her mother put her in charge of the family kitchen's weekly grocery list in Kolkata at age nine.

"I've mapped the construction sequence," she said. "Priority one: Town Centre. It unlocks all other building options. Priority two: barracks, for when the settlers arrive. Priority three: defenses — walls and at least two turrets. Priority four: a mine, whichever is closest. Priority five — "

"Priority five is the dhaba," Pramod announced, emerging from the tank's interior with a portable stove balanced on one shoulder and a bag of supplies on the other. He set both down on the ridge's highest point with the particular ceremony of a man planting a flag. "The dhaba comes before walls. Before turrets. Before mines. A colony without food is a camp. A camp is temporary. A dhaba makes it permanent."

"Pramod, we're building military infrastructure — "

"Military infrastructure runs on chai and parantha. This is not philosophy. This is logistics." He began unpacking with the particular efficiency of a man who had set up field kitchens in three galaxies and who regarded the establishment of a food service as the foundational act of civilisation. "I need a flat surface, a water source, and someone to chop these." He held up what appeared to be alien vegetables that he had been growing in a container garden on the tank. "They're not exactly onions but they make a similar noise when you cut them."

"A similar noise?"

"They crackle. Like tiny screams. Very therapeutic."

The Town Centre went up first. The Game's construction system was — I had to admit — elegant. You designated a site, allocated resources, and the building materialised over the course of hours, assembling itself from the ground up with the particular magic of a system that had decided that the tedium of actual construction was less interesting than the strategy of deciding what to build and where. The Town Centre was a modest structure — stone walls, a central hall, offices for administration, a common room that would serve as the squad's meeting space. It appeared on the ridge like a statement: we are here, we intend to stay, and we have a building to prove it.

With the Town Centre complete, the construction menu expanded. Barracks, apartments, walls, turrets, mines, workshops — the full vocabulary of a colony, available for construction, each with resource costs and build times that required the particular balancing act of a person who understood that you couldn't build everything at once and that the order in which you built things was, itself, a strategy.

I built the walls first. Not because I was afraid — though fear was present, the low-frequency anxiety of a person who had been attacked enough times to know that the question was not if but when — but because walls sent a message. To whatever was out there — Game-spawned monsters, alien infiltrators, the particular malice of a universe that had decided humans were interesting enough to draft into its war — walls said: we know you're coming, and we've already started preparing.

The walls went up in a day. Basic stone, two metres high, encircling the ridge. Not impressive. Not impenetrable. But present. A line drawn in alien dirt that said: this side is ours.

Chandni planted the turrets. Two of them, one at each corner of the wall that faced the swamp's deepest section — the direction from which threats would most likely emerge, because threats, like water, followed the path of least resistance, and the swamp's open expanse was easier to cross than the rocky terrain on the other sides.

"Auto-targeting?" she asked, adjusting the turret's settings with the particular glee of a woman who regarded automated weapons as the highest expression of human engineering.

"Auto-targeting for anything the Game classifies as hostile. Manual override for everything else."

"Manual override means I get to shoot things personally."

"Manual override means you get to make tactical decisions about target priority."

"Same thing." She patted the turret with the affection that other people reserved for pets. "I'm calling this one Munna. The other one is Guddu."

"You're naming the turrets."

"Everything worth shooting deserves a name. Munna and Guddu. Brothers in arms."

The barracks went up next. Basic structures — bunk rooms, shared bathrooms, a mess hall that connected to what would become Pramod's dhaba. The apartments followed — single-room units for the laborers who would arrive, twenty units in a complex that the Game built with the particular efficiency of mass construction: identical, functional, the architectural equivalent of a sentence that communicated everything it needed to and nothing more.

By the end of the first week, Haven existed.

That was Ira's name for it. She'd submitted it through the Game's colony registration system without consulting anyone, because Ira operated on the principle that decisions made quickly were better than decisions made by committee, and because the name — Haven — said exactly what she wanted it to say: this is a safe place, and we intend to keep it that way.

"Haven," Chandni said, testing the word. "It sounds like a retirement village."

"It sounds like a promise," Bhavana said.

"It sounds like a target," Rukmini said, because Rukmini's job was to think about the things that everyone else preferred not to think about.

"It sounds like home," Pramod said, from behind the counter of his newly constructed dhaba, which had been the seventh structure built and which Pramod had insisted on designing personally, overriding the Game's default layout with modifications that included a tandoor (improvised from the Game's forge equipment), a chai station (dedicated, separate from cooking, because "chai and cooking share space the way a tiger and a goat share a cage — someone gets eaten"), and a seating area that faced the sunset because Pramod believed that food tasted better when accompanied by a view.

Haven. Population: eight, about to be fifty-five. A colony built on a swamp, on a moon, in a galaxy that was playing a war game with every sentient species it could find. A town that existed because Central Command needed resources and my squad needed a purpose and Pramod needed somewhere to put his tandoor.

I stood on the wall — the basic stone wall, two metres high, the line drawn in alien dirt — and looked out over the swamp. The sun was setting, which on this moon meant the gas giant swallowed the light gradually, the horizon turning from the unnamed colour to something deeper, something that was almost purple but not quite, the colour of a sky that was not Earth's sky and that would never be Earth's sky but that was, I was beginning to understand, our sky.

The chai was ready. Pramod's voice carried from the dhaba: "First chai of the new colony! Complimentary for the builders! After today, you pay!"

Nobody paid. Pramod never charged. The threat of payment was a performance, the dhaba-owner's equivalent of a running joke, the particular comedy of a man who fed people for free and pretended it was a business because the pretence gave him structure and structure was what kept Pramod — who had lost his family in the draft, who had been separated from his wife and children on the day the sky opened, who did not know if they were alive or dead or playing their own war game on some other moon in some other system — structure was what kept Pramod cooking instead of collapsing.

I drank the chai. Watched the sunset. Somewhere out there, in the swamp and the forest and the unnamed expanse of a moon that was ours because the Game said so, something was watching back. I couldn't see it. I couldn't name it. But I could feel it — the particular attention of a predator assessing a new arrival, deciding whether the arrival was prey or competition or something else entirely.

The turrets hummed. Munna and Guddu, standing guard. Chandni's children. Haven's first line of defense.

"Day one," I said to no one in particular.

"Day one," Bhavana echoed, from somewhere behind me, because Bhavana was always somewhere behind me, watching my back with the particular attention of a person who had decided that my survival was her responsibility and who took her responsibilities seriously.

Day one. The colony existed. The swamp stank. The chai was good. And somewhere in the dark, the next crisis was already assembling itself.