3
RORY
The quarters he gave me were roughly the size of my entire apartment back home, except instead of Ikea furniture and motivational posters, everything was made of some dark metal alloy that hummed faintly if I pressed my palm against it.
The bed was wide enough for three of me and firm in a way that suggested Velkorin sleeping preferences ran toward "slab of granite.
" The lighting was warm amber, built into the walls themselves, and it adjusted when I moved—brighter near my hands, dimmer at the periphery, like the room was watching me.
I was trying really hard not to think about that.
I was also trying really hard not to think about the fact that I was on an alien planet, wearing borrowed clothes that fit surprisingly well in spite of being designed for a species with a fundamentally different skeletal structure, staring at a tactical display that showed a three-year war I'd been asked to help win by a seven-foot reptilian commander who took everything literally and glowed when he was stressed.
Instead, I was thinking about the war. Because that, at least, was a problem I could break down into pieces.
Vrex had spent two hours briefing me. I'd asked for paper—they didn't have paper, but they had a stylus and a flat tablet that recorded strokes, which was close enough. I'd filled six pages with notes while he talked about the ceremonial war.
Two factions of Velkorin disputed ownership of Kren Valley.
The dispute went back generations. Rather than total war, which the Velkorin had apparently tried several centuries ago, with results devastating enough to change their entire civilization—they'd developed a system of formalized combat.
Rules. Schedules. Neutral observers. Specific weapon categories.
Designated combat zones within the disputed territory.
Everything documented, everything witnessed, everything bound by a complicated honor code.
The goal was straightforward—control enough of the valley to force the opposing faction—led by General Krenix—to concede.
Controlled territory was measured by holding strategic positions during scheduled engagement periods.
Think capture-the-flag, except the flags were carved into mountainsides and the players were seven-foot-tall warriors with claws.
"So it's competitive paintball," I'd said, about forty minutes into the briefing.
Vrex had stared at me. His officers—two of them, standing at the edges of the room like gargoyles—had made sounds that I was learning to interpret as various flavors of disapproval.
"It is a sacred tradition spanning four centuries of—"
"Right, right. Sacred tradition. But the mechanics.
You have defined playing fields. Time-limited engagements.
Specific weapon restrictions. A scoring system based on territorial control.
You rotate through different zones on a schedule.
You can't use certain tactics because the honor code forbids them.
" I'd tapped my stylus against the tablet.
"That's tournament paintball with extra steps. "
The silence had been magnificent. Two officers, one seven-foot commander, and a holographic tactical display, all staring at a woman in borrowed clothes who had just compared their sacred ancestral tradition to a weekend activity for suburban teenagers.
"The analogy is not—" Vrex had paused, and I watched him process it. Really process it, not the defensive dismissal I'd gotten from his officers. His amber eyes had moved to the tactical display, then to his notes, then back to me. "The analogy is not entirely without merit."
"Commander—" one of the officers began.
"The human's comparison is imprecise but structurally sound. The engagement framework shares functional similarities with competitive simulation combat. This does not diminish its significance." He'd looked at me. "It merely identifies its mechanics."
That was the moment I started paying attention to Vrex as more than a walking wall of scales.
Because I knew what it looked like when someone was smart enough to hear a new idea without their ego getting in the way, and I'd spent six years watching people fail that test. Kyle failed it every time I suggested a schedule change.
My parents failed it whenever I tried to explain why Battlezone wasn't a dead-end job.
Vrex—alien commander, warrior species, fighting a war that meant everything to him—heard a human compare his sacred tradition to paintball and thought about it instead of dismissing it.
That took more strength than anything his muscles could do.
He'd spent the remaining hour and twenty minutes of the briefing thoroughly answering my questions with unexpected patience.
I asked about terrain types. He showed me three-dimensional terrain scans.
I asked about weapon restrictions. He produced a catalog of approved armaments with technical specifications I couldn't fully parse but could understand the categories of.
I asked about the honor code's enforcement mechanism—what happened when someone broke the rules.
"Violation of the honor code results in immediate forfeiture of contested territory and potential sanctions from the Observer Corps," he'd said. "The code has been violated seven times in four centuries. Three of those violations ended careers."
"So the rules matter."
"The rules are the foundation of our civilization's alternative to total war. They are not merely rules. They are the reason my people do not annihilate each other."
That shut me up for about thirty seconds, which was long enough for him to show me the historical casualty reports from the pre-code era.
The numbers were staggering. An entire generation of Velkorin warriors, wiped out in a territorial dispute that the ceremonial war system would have resolved in five years of formalized combat instead of fifty years of genocide.
"Okay," I'd said, looking at the casualty numbers. "I take back the paintball comparison. This is paintball if the alternative was nuclear war."
"I do not know what 'nuclear' means."
"Pray you never do."
He'd also mentioned, almost as an afterthought, that the Velkorin had provisions for integrating outsiders who served the civilization.
Article Seven of the Extraordinary Service Code—citizenship granted for contributions that materially altered the outcome of a military campaign.
It had been invoked four times in Velkorin history, all for members of allied species. Never for a human.
I'd written it down. Filed it under "probably irrelevant but interesting."
Now, alone in my quarters at what Vrex had told me was nearly dawn—their days were twenty-six hours, which my body was going to love—I spread my notes across the too-large bed and started doing what I did best.
I made a list.
PROBLEMS I CAN SEE ALREADY
They're reactive, not proactive. Every engagement follows the same pattern. Krenix pushes, Vrex responds. Nobody's setting the tempo.
They're using the same tactics their grandparents used. Literally. Vrex showed me historical records and the formations were identical.
The honor code has loopholes. Not violations—loopholes. Things that aren't forbidden because nobody thought to forbid them. Krenix is exploiting some of these. Vrex isn't exploiting any, because he considers it dishonorable to even look for them.
Their scheduling is terrible. Battle rotations are predictable. I could plan Krenix's next three moves right now based on the pattern.
Morale. Three years of fighting with no progress. The soldiers are going through motions. I've seen the same thing at the arena when a team's been losing all day—they stop trying to win and start trying not to embarrass themselves.
I sat back against the headboard and stared at the ceiling. It was dark metal like everything else, with faint lines of amber light tracing patterns I couldn't read.
This was insane. I managed birthday parties.
I scheduled paintball rotations. I kept teenagers from murdering each other over whose turn it was in the snack shack.
I was not a military strategist. I had no business being on an alien planet, reading about a centuries-old war, and thinking I can fix this.
Except the problems I'd identified in two hours of briefing?
They were the same problems I fixed every single Saturday.
Teams that played not to lose instead of playing to win.
Predictable rotations that let the other side set up ambushes.
Rules that could be used creatively if you actually read them.
And morale—God, morale—I'd turned around more losing teams with a fifteen-minute halftime pep talk and a creative rule interpretation than I could count.
I picked up the stylus again and started a new page.
WHAT I WOULD DO IF THIS WERE BATTLEZONE
Stop reacting. Set the schedule. Make THEM respond to US.
Study the honor code like it's the employee handbook—find every gap, every ambiguity, every "well technically" moment.
Break formation patterns. Use randomization. If Krenix can predict your next three moves, you've already lost those engagements.
Cross-train the teams. Specialists are great until they're predictable.
Fix morale first. Nothing else works if the soldiers have already quit inside.
The list made sense. It made so much sense that my stomach did a slow roll, because either I was right, and a paintball manager had just diagnosed a three-year war in a single evening, or I was wrong, and I was going to embarrass myself in front of an entire alien civilization.
Both options terrified me for completely different reasons.
I put down the stylus, pulled my knees up, and pressed my forehead against them.
The borrowed clothes smelled like something clean and mineral—not unpleasant, just foreign.
Everything was foreign. The gravity was fractionally lighter than Earth, enough to make my steps feel slightly wrong.
The air had a metallic taste that sat at the back of my throat.
The silence was different here. No traffic, no neighbors, no refrigerator hum.
Just the faint pulse of the building itself, a low vibration I could feel through the bed frame.
I was twenty-nine years old, sitting on an alien bed in borrowed alien clothes on an alien planet, and the most terrifying thing about this entire situation was that for the first time in years, I wanted to try.
Not just show up and manage. Not just keep things from falling apart. Actually try. Put myself out there, risk being wrong, risk failing spectacularly in front of people who already thought I was a joke.
The last time I'd wanted something like that, I'd been standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon with a self-timer and a belief that the world was big enough for me.
"Okay," I said to the empty room. "Okay. Let's do this."
I found Vrex in the war room. My body insisted it was way too early, but his clock claimed it was mid-morning.
He was standing exactly where I'd left him three hours ago, which either meant he hadn't slept or the man had a standing relationship with his tactical display that bordered on the romantic.
"I want to observe the next battle," I said.
His amber eyes tracked from the display to me. I was wearing the clothes they'd provided—fitted dark fabric and sturdy boots, with a jacket that had more pockets than I could count. It all fit like it had been made for me, which was suspicious.
But I had bigger problems.
"The next engagement is in three days."
"Good. That gives me time to read your honor code."
Behind Vrex, the officer I'd silently named Gargoyle One made a sound like gravel in a blender. Gargoyle Two—who I'd later learn was Zenir, his second-in-command, just looked at me with an expression that, translated across species, clearly said and what exactly do you think you'll accomplish?
"The honor code is nine hundred pages of formalized military law," Vrex said.
"Great. I read fast." I held up my tablet. "And I have questions. Like, section twelve, subsection four. I skimmed the table of contents on the way here—is there actually a clause about 'unconventional tactical approaches,' or is that a translation issue?"
Vrex's scales flickered. Just for a second, bronze-gold along his jaw. Not frustration. I was learning his palette. Surprise.
"There is such a clause. It is rarely invoked."
"Why?"
"Because it is considered—" He paused, selecting his words carefully. "Ungentlemanly."
I smiled. It was not a nice smile. It was my Brandon's-Mom-is-coming-and-I-have-a-plan smile, which had never once failed me.
"Commander Vrex. I'm going to tell you something about me that I think is going to be very relevant to your war." I set my tablet on his display table, right next to three years of mapped failure. "I have never once in my life been a gentleman."
Vrex looked at me. I looked at him. His officers glowered behind him—one skeptical, one already annoyed, neither interested in anything a human paintball manager had to say.
But Vrex kept looking. Not past me. Not through me. At me. Like he was recalculating something he'd thought was fixed.
"I'll observe the battle," I said. "And then I'll tell you what I see."
His amber eyes held mine for a long moment. "Very well," he said.
His officers shifted behind him. But Vrex just kept looking at me, like he was trying to solve a problem he hadn't expected to encounter.
Yeah. That made two of us.