The suit sensors showed him tendrils starting to wrap around his legs. He’d be cocooned in minutes, probably less. He didn’t have the power to tear the strands free.

Power!

He yelled out the old yeargroup games war cry. It was shockingly loud in the helmet, ratcheting up the claustrophobia another couple of degrees, and now there was the very real prospect of drowning in alien gunk if the seals were breached. It took him thirty seconds to issue instructions to the cohort, rerouting the electrical output of their aneutronic fusion chambers, taking safety systems offline, cranking the output to redline.

“Go,” he commanded.

The combined power of the twenty-seven generators discharged through the cohort’s shells. Everything went black. Dellian had no displays, no suit functions. He couldn’t even sense the cohort, which spiked his fear.

Black panic really hit then. He began to struggle. The suit held him tight. He screamed.

“Hang on,” Tilliana’s smooth voice instructed through the unnerving darkness. “We’re getting you out.”

The high-pitched whine of actuators cut through Dellian’s frenzy. He forced himself to stop thrashing about and drew some shaky breaths. A crack of bright light appeared right in front of him as the helmet hinged apart. Faster! Great Saints, I want this to stop. Then the spongy contact pads that made up the interior of the suit released their grip on his sweaty skin. The helmet finished opening, and he could see the simulation egg’s upper segments rising away from his body on the end of metal tentacles. They withdrew into a service globe in the middle of the simulation chamber, leaving him drifting a few centimeters above the pedestal that formed the rear half of the egg. He reached up and peeled the medic patches from his neck and thighs, then pulled the waste tube cap from his dick.

The cohort returned to haunt the back of his mind, and they didn’t seem upset at all. It had all been just another training session for them.

“You okay?” Tilliana asked.

“Sure. Fine.” Right now Dellian didn’t want to think about what had happened, how badly he’d reacted to the exercise. The stress had drained away, to be replaced by shabby embarrassment. He could barely bring himself to glance around the spherical chamber.

The other simulation eggs had opened, leaving his squad floating listlessly above the pedestals. Most of them didn’t even have the energy to remove their patches and tubes.

That was bad, he thought—although a part of him was wondering if they didn’t deserve it. The last eighteen months had seen them run through some of the toughest simulations the tech strategists could dream up—and they could dream nasty. Eighty-three percent success level, putting their squad well out in front of anyone else. This, though, this was on a whole other level of crap.