They were sitting in a room that was too bright.
Rows of metal benches, bolted to the floor. White walls, white ceiling, white light panels that didn’t hum or flicker, just glared. A big screen at the front, currently black. Aurora nodes in the ceiling watched everything.
Kaden sat on the second bench from the back. Navarro was on his left, staring at nothing. Hargreaves sat straight-backed on his right, jaw clenched so tight Kaden could hear the faint grind of his teeth whenever the room fell quiet.
Jensen’s spot was empty.
The helmets were gone. Armor stripped off and stacked outside. They were still in their undersuits, soft weave that smelled like sweat and recirc air and cleaning chemicals. Kaden’s sleeves were stained a faded brown where the blood had soaked in and started to dry.
He’d tried to scrub it off in the washroom outside. It was stubborn. Like it had sunk into the fabric as deep as it had sunk into his head.
The door at the front hissed open.
Instructor Kallix walked in. He was tall in that ex-marine way, all straight lines and muscle time hadn’t softened. His own jumpsuit was immaculate. The Hegemony crest on his shoulder looked like it had never seen dirt.
Behind him came another officer in darker grey, rank tabs Kaden didn’t recognize. Older. Thinner. Hard eyes. A third figure trailed them, a woman in a medic’s white-striped uniform carrying a slate.
The murmur of cadets talking died on its own.
Kallix didn’t tell them to stand. He walked to the front, touched a control on his wrist, and the screen behind him came to life.
[DEBRIEF: TRAINING SCENARIO HULK-3B]
[STATUS: TERMINATED – FATAL INCIDENT]
The words sat there in simple white text on black.
Kallix looked over the room for a long moment. His gaze passed over Kaden without stopping, then came back and lingered.
“Sit up,” he said. “Pay attention. This is a debrief, not a memorial. Memorials come later, if you live long enough to attend them.”
The line was old. Kaden had heard it in other contexts, usually attached to botched sim runs and bruised cadets.
Today it landed differently.
The older officer stepped forward beside Kallix. When he spoke, his voice had that official tone Kaden recognized from Hegemony announcements in the arcology.
“I am Commander Rios,” he said. “Oversight for this training node. There was an incident during Scenario Hulk-3B that resulted in a cadet fatality. That is unacceptable. It is also, regrettably, not unique.”
Several cadets shifted on the benches. No one spoke.
Rios tapped his slate. The screen changed. A freeze-frame appeared: the turret dropping through the ceiling, dust and insulation hanging in the air like smoke, cadets mid-motion.
“Preliminary analysis,” Rios said, “shows a firmware fault in the turret’s loadout protocol. A live-fire module was loaded into a sim frame. The safety interlock did not catch the mismatch before deployment. Live ammunition was used for approximately three seconds before the system flagged the mode conflict and killed the turret.”
Three seconds.
Kaden’s hands tightened on his knees.
“In plain language,” Rios went on, “you were in a sim. Then, for three seconds, you were not.”
The screen flicked again. Now it showed Jensen at the moment of impact, time slowed to a crawl. The shard of metal glinting as it spun. Jensen’s chest plate bulging inward.
Kaden’s stomach flipped. Navarro swore very softly under her breath.
Kallix glanced at the image and then back at the cadets.
“This training facility has run twelve thousand four hundred and eleven boarding scenarios since Aurora integration,” he said. “We have logged sixteen hardware failures and three fatalities. That is a better ratio than the real war by several orders of magnitude.”
“Doesn’t feel like it,” someone muttered near the front.
Kallix ignored it. “You are here to prepare for Andromeda. Aurora and the Hegemony give you structured risk instead of chaos. That is the point of this place. Not to keep you safe. To keep you alive long enough to matter.”
Rios nodded once, as if they’d rehearsed that line.
“Today’s malfunction will be logged,” Rios said. “Hardware will be pulled, audited, replaced. Personnel responsible for maintenance will be investigated. Appropriate disciplinary action will be taken if negligence is found.”
None of that brought Jensen back.
Kaden watched the screen instead of their faces. The freeze-frame of his friend, about to be hit, felt worse than the memory. In his head, it had happened fast. Here, time crawled, drawing out every millimeter of the shard’s path.
Rios flicked the image away.
“Now we debrief your performance,” he said. “Because malfunction or not, you are expected to respond like marines, not bystanders.”
An uneasy sound went through the room.
Kallix gestured at the benches. “Squad Bravo. Stand.”
Kaden’s stomach dropped.
He stood. Navarro and Hargreaves rose with him. A few other cadets from their run—rear security; the kid who’d been stuck at the back and never fired a shot. They lined up awkwardly in front of their bench.
Aurora pinged Kaden’s HUD.
[FOCUS: ACTIVE DEBRIEF – RECORDING]
Rios looked them over. “Names.”
“Hargreaves, Tolan,” Hargreaves said.
“Navarro, Talia.”
“Mercer, Kaden.”
The others followed suit.
Rios nodded to Kallix. “Run it.”
Kallix tapped his wrist again. The lights dimmed slightly. The screen split into four panels: helmet cams from Hargreaves, Navarro, Jensen, Kaden. All timestamped, Aurora’s neat white numerals ticking at the corner.
The run started. The corridor. The first drones. Their sloppy but functional advance.
“This is before the malfunction,” Kallix said. “Standard Hulk-3B. Hostiles minimal. Objective straightforward. You executed adequately. Some of you even did what we trained you to do.”
On-screen Navarro snorted at something. Hargreaves barked orders. Kaden watched himself move, his own camera stubbornly centered on his sight picture, never quite as steady as he’d thought.
Then the ceiling panel tore free.
Kaden flinched, even though this time there was no sound, the playback muted.
The turret fell. The red strip swept. The warning flashed on his HUD feed.
Jensen spoke, half a word. The shot hit.
The impact looked worse from Jensen’s perspective. His camera jerked to the side, went briefly black, then flickered back in at a skewed angle, floor and ceiling spinning. His own HP bar blinked in the upper left of his POV, a fat green bar suddenly sheared in half and bleeding red.
HP: 54%
“Pause,” Kallix said.
Everything froze.
He turned to face the room. “You are cadets. You are in a ‘safe’ training environment. Aurora gives you more data than most front-line marines had at Advent. How many of you actually watch the HP bars when it matters?”
No one answered. A few cadets stared at their hands.
Kallix looked back at Squad Bravo. “Mercer.”
Kaden swallowed. “Sir.”
“You saw that number drop in real time,” Kallix said. “Walk us through what you did next.”
Kaden’s mouth went dry.
The screen advanced in slow motion. He watched his own camera swing away from the turret to where Jensen fell.
“I moved to him,” Kaden said. His voice sounded too loud. “I heard him make a sound. I knew he’d taken a hit. I went to… to check him.”
“You left cover,” Rios said.
“Yes, sir.”
“And the turret was still active.”
“Yes, sir.”
Rios considered that. “Why?”
Because he was making that sound. Because the bar had dropped. Because someone had to.
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Because no one else was moving.
“I thought…” Kaden started, then stopped. He tried again. “I thought I could do something. Sir.”
“Could you?” Rios asked.
The medic at the side of the room shifted her weight. Her slate glowed faintly.
“Let him finish,” Kallix said.
The footage played again. Kaden watched himself sprint. Jensen’s camera flickered, then settled on a tilted view of the ceiling.
Kaden’s own feed showed the chest plate, crushed and wrong. The visor with its spiderweb cracks. The HP bar in Jensen’s view had ticked lower by the time Kaden reached him.
HP: 31%
Kaden heard his own voice from the recording, tinny and too high. Hearing the panic from outside his own skull made him want to climb out of his skin.
Rios lifted a hand. “Stop there.”
The video froze again.
“Mercer,” he said. “At this point, what formal medical training had you received?”
“Basic first aid module, sir,” Kaden said. “Stop external bleeding. Stabilize limbs. Call for evac.”
“Did that include management of severe internal trauma from live ordnance?”
“No, sir.”
“Did you know what you were doing?”
Kaden closed his eyes for half a second. “No, sir.”
“And yet you went anyway.”
“Yes, sir.”
Rios turned to the room at large. “You will hear conflicting messages during your time here. ‘Do not be heroes.’ ‘Do not break formation.’ ‘Look after your squad.’ ‘Never leave a man behind.’ Some of these cancel each other. Aurora cannot reconcile them for you. You will have to make choices.”
He looked back to Kaden. “You made a choice.”
Kaden stared at the floor. “Yes, sir.”
Kallix rolled the footage forward again, now at normal speed.
They watched Kaden struggle with the armor latches. Heard Jensen scream. Saw the sealant patch slapped down. The HP bar stuttered in small, cruel increments.
24%
20%
17%
14%
The medics arrived. The bars and tags did their last little dance.
1%
[KIA]
The playback ended there. The screen went black.
No one spoke for a long moment.
The medic at the side of the room finally stepped forward. Her voice was softer than Kallix’s, but not gentle.
“From a medical standpoint,” she said, “Cadet Mercer’s actions did not significantly alter the outcome.”
Kaden felt Navarro stiffen beside him.
The medic continued before anyone could react.
“With the resources available to him and his training level, the probability of survival was low the moment that fragment hit. The chest cavity was catastrophically compromised. Internal organs were destroyed. Time-to-failure was under a minute. That is not opinion. That is Aurora’s modeled outcome.”
Rios nodded. “Aurora assures us that Jensen’s death was ninety-six percent likely, given the damage profile.”
Ninety-six. The number hung in the air like a weight.
Kaden realized his hands were clenched so hard his nails dug into his palms. He loosened them, slowly.
“But,” the medic said, and this time her gaze went to Kaden, steady and direct, “Mercer’s actions did buy time. He slowed the bleed. He kept the airway as clear as he could without moving the patient. He did not freeze. He did not run. That matters.”
“Not to Jensen,” someone in the back said, too low for anyone official to catch. Kaden heard it anyway.
Kallix’s eyes hardened. “That matters to the squads you will serve in,” he said. “Because most of you did freeze. You know who you are.”
The room shifted, a quiet ripple, guilt and defensiveness moving through the benches.
Navarro stared straight ahead, jaw tight. Hargreaves’ fingers flexed at his sides.
Kallix looked back at Squad Bravo. “Hargreaves.”
“Sir.”
“You continued to engage the turret. Correct?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Did you want to go to Jensen?”
Hargreaves hesitated. “Yes, sir.”
“And why didn’t you?”
“Because the turret was still up,” Hargreaves said. “Someone had to keep it off Mercer. And… and if we all ran to Jensen, it would have killed us too.”
Kallix nodded. “That is a correct tactical decision. It is also one you will make again, and again, and again. If you live long enough.”
He turned to Navarro. “Navarro.”
“Sir.”
“If you had gone instead of Mercer, what would you have done differently?”
Navarro’s mouth opened. Closed. She looked, briefly, at Kaden.
“I… don’t know, sir,” she said. “I only have the same basic first aid.”
“So,” Kallix said, “the choice was not between Mercer’s flawed intervention and some hypothetical perfect one. The choice was between someone doing something imperfect, and no one doing anything at all.”
He let that settle over the room.
No one sounded heroic in this version. No one got to feel good.
Rios took over again. “This is the part you do not see in recruitment holo-vids,” he said. “The Academy is a controlled environment. Aurora tries to keep the risk manageable. It does not eradicate it. You can die here. You saw that today. Some of you will see it again.”
He looked down at his slate.
“Cadet Jensen’s record will be updated with a line of duty death. His family will receive appropriate notification and compensation. His service time will be counted toward his bloodline’s caste evaluation. His death will be used in training material, anonymized, to prevent others from making the same mistakes.”
The clinical phrasing made Kaden’s teeth hurt.
“The hardware fault will be corrected,” Rios went on. “You will not run Hulk-3B again until the turret system has been replaced and audited. That is the Hegemony’s responsibility. Your responsibility is to learn from what happened inside those three seconds and the moments that followed.”
He met Kaden’s eyes, then Navarro’s, then Hargreaves’.
“None of you are to blame for the malfunction,” he said. “All of you are accountable for how you responded. That is the distinction you must learn to live with.”
Kallix stepped forward again. “Squad Bravo, sit.”
They sat. Kaden tried not to sag.
“For the rest of you,” Kallix said, scanning the room, “you will review this footage in smaller groups. You will identify fault lines in your responses. You will run modified sims. You will fix what you can fix. And you will accept that some things are outside your control.”
He paused, then added, more quietly, “Aurora does not owe you a fair fight. Neither does the war.”
Rios tapped his slate. The screen went dark.
“Debrief concludes in ten minutes,” he said. “After which you will be dismissed to your quarters. Mandatory individual debriefs for Squad Bravo will be scheduled through your personal nodes.”
Aurora chimed in Kaden’s peripheral vision.
[Personal Debrief Scheduled: MERCER, KADEN]
[Time: 19:00 | Location: Med Annex 3]
The medic by the wall glanced at him when the notification hit. It was a small thing, that flick of her eyes, but he noticed.
“Questions,” Rios said.
No one raised a hand. No one wanted to be the one to ask why a system that could count percentages until the moment someone died hadn’t prevented any of it in the first place.
Kallix waited a few breaths, then nodded. “Dismissed. Quietly.”
The benches scraped as cadets stood. Conversations began in low, urgent tones as they filed out. Words like “fuck” and “bullshit” and “that could’ve been me” floated in the air and faded.
Navarro did not move.
Kaden stood slowly. His legs felt like someone else’s, then remembered how to work.
“You good?” Navarro asked, still staring at the blank screen.
“No,” Kaden said. Honesty came easier now. “You?”
“Also no.”
Hargreaves scrubbed his hands over his face. “Psych’s going to have a field day with this,” he said. “You two already got your personal debrief pings?”
Kaden nodded. Navarro sighed and checked her HUD.
“Yeah,” she said. “Lucky us.”
They walked out together, past Rios and Kallix and the medic. None of the three stopped them. None offered a word.
In the corridor, the noise from the other cadets bounced and echoed. Someone laughed too loudly and then cut it off. Someone else swore at a wall.
Kaden kept his eyes on the floor.
Navarro fell into step beside him. “You know they’re going to use that footage for years, right?” she said. “Slow it down, circle every stupid thing we did in bright red.”
Kaden thought of the moment where he’d slapped the sealant down and Jensen had screamed.
“Good,” he said.
Navarro shot him a look. “Good?”
“If they’re going to show it to everyone,” he said, “maybe someone will know what to do next time.”
She opened her mouth, then closed it again.
They reached the junction where the corridor split. One way to the barracks. Another to the med annex.
Navarro jerked her head toward the barracks. “You coming?”
“In a bit,” Kaden said. “I’ve got the med debrief at nineteen hundred.”
She hesitated. “You want company?”
He considered it. The idea of Navarro sitting there while a medic rewound Jensen’s death again made his skin crawl.
“I’ll be fine,” he said.
“Liar,” she said, but there was no heat in it. “I’ll save you a shower slot.”
He managed the ghost of a smile. “Thanks.”
She went left. He turned right.
The corridor to the med annex was quieter. Cooler. The lighting softer. The smell shifted from metal and sweat to antiseptic and recycled air with a sharper edge.
Kaden checked the time. He had twenty minutes.
He ducked into a side alcove with a bench, sat down, and stared at his hands. The brown-red stains on his sleeves looked darker here, under the med lights.
Aurora idled in the corner of his vision. No prompts, no bars, just the small icon that said it was always watching.
He blinked a menu open with a thought.
[CADET MERCER, KADEN]
[CURRENT Class: Rifleman]
[LEVEL: 1]
His stats slid into view.
PHY: 6
AGI: 4
COG: 7
RES: 5
AP: 5
Five was supposed to be baseline for integrated humans. The number you started from. People with no Aurora integration at all had their AP listed as zero, if it was listed at all.
At induction, seeing his numbers a little above or below the line had felt like something. Now they felt like a joke.
Not because of the values themselves. Because none of them had mattered when he had been kneeling on the deck with Jensen’s chest open under his hands and an AP bar he hadn’t had a single skill to spend on.
He flicked to another menu. Training modules. Rifle drills. Tactics blocks. Basic first aid. All the familiar icons.
He scrolled.
There, lower down, a set of modules grayed out for his current class.
[FIELD MEDICINE – INTRO]
[TRAUMA RESPONSE – LEVEL 1]
[AURORA AUGMENTATION – MEDICAL BASICS]
He hovered over one.
[Access Restricted – Specialization Required]
Of course.
He stared at it anyway.
His HUD blinked for a moment, and a small text line appeared at the edge of his vision.
[Suggested Content: Review – Basic First Aid Module]
[Suggested Content: New – Field Medicine Recruitment Overview]
The second suggestion sat there, faint. Not a command. Not a requirement. Just a little breadcrumb.
“Recruitment,” he muttered.
He opened it.
The world narrowed to a floating panel.
A calm voice, not tied to any face, spoke in his ear. Aurora’s training module persona.
“Combat Medics are responsible for maintaining the fighting strength of their unit under hostile conditions,” it said. “They are expected to perform triage, stabilization, and emergency interventions while under fire. They experience higher cognitive and emotional load than standard Rifleman track cadets. Mortality rates are correspondingly elevated.”
A list of requirements appeared. Attributes. Resilience notes. Recommended AP baseline.
A small line of text at the bottom flickered.
[Note: Candidates with prior live-trauma exposure may demonstrate higher aptitude.]
He closed the module halfway through.
He did not want Aurora to recruit him. He did not want a soothing voice explaining “opportunities for advancement.”
He wanted Jensen’s HP bar not to have hit zero.
That option was not on the menu.
He sat there until the time indicator in his HUD ticked over to 18:59. Then he stood, brushed his hands uselessly against his thighs, and went to Med Annex 3 to let them replay what he had already watched a dozen times behind his eyes.
As he walked, the Field Medicine module he had half-opened sat quietly in the back of his HUD, marked:
[Status: Incomplete – 3% Viewed]
He did not dismiss it.
