The blue line in Kaden’s HUD led them out of the auditorium and into the ship.

  Valiant’s corridor swallowed the noise of the briefing with the same casual efficiency it swallowed everything else. The hatch slid shut behind Theta-3 and what was left of Third Shock, muting voices and leaving the muffled thud of boots and the low hum of systems in the walls.

  The blue AR path ran down the center of the deck like someone had spilled neon paint and it had decided to behave. It curved around a junction, dove down a stairwell, then split at a T-intersection: a narrower thread peeling off to the right with a small tag hovering above it.

  3RD SHOCK – MARINE DECK ACCESS

  “Showtime,” Navarro said beside him.

  “Pretty sure the last thing we did was showtime,” Kaden said.

  “That was the trailer,” she said. “This is where they decide which cast members die in season one.”

  “Stop talking,” someone ahead of them grunted.

  Kaden didn’t see who, but the tone said older, tired, not in the mood. He shut up. Navarro did too.

  They moved with the cluster of Theta-3 tags, following the blue line into a narrower passage. The air here was different from the target-ship smell of the academy hulks. Drier, with a faint tang of ozone and oil. The vibration under his boots was more complex too, a layered thrumming that felt like someone had stacked half a dozen different engines into the spine over the years.

  He glanced back. Through the thinning crowd he caught one last glimpse of Song, swept up in the flow heading after the green line that marked Theta-5’s path. Song flashed him a quick two-finger salute, then vanished around a corner.

  The blue line pulled Theta-3 down another stairwell, then through a long, slightly curved corridor. Bulkheads here bore more scars than the cleaner upper decks—gouges in the metal, patches where plates had been sliced out and replaced, places where the paint gave up entirely and naked armor showed through.

  Somewhere behind the walls, coolant hissed through pipes. A ventilation vane clicked arrhythmically overhead, then settled.

  The node pinged a small notice in Kaden’s peripheral vision.

  ZONE: 3RD SHOCK MARINE SPACES

  AURORA OVERLAY: MINIMAL – COMBAT OPTIMIZED

  At the Academy, his HUD had always felt just shy of pushy. Path suggestions, flickering training prompts, little reminders to hydrate or log hours. Here, the blue line was clear; everything else sat farther back, waiting to be asked for. Tags floated with names, ranks, units, sometimes tier and level if people didn’t lock them down, but the rest stayed where it belonged: between you and Aurora until someone needed to know.

  Navarro blew out a breath.

  “Feels different,” she muttered.

  “How?” Kaden asked.

  “Can’t hear the instructors judging me,” she said. “Just the ship.”

  Ahead, the corridor opened into a broader crossway. Pipes ran along the ceiling in bundled rows, labeled in stencils that had been repainted more than once. A cluster of marines waited there, some with Theta-1 and Theta-2 tags, some with no squad marker yet. They’d clearly beaten Theta-3 here.

  At the center of the crossway, leaning against a bulkhead near a hatch marked in bold white text, stood a woman with a face like a carved bulkhead and the posture of a coiled spring.

  Kaden’s HUD identified her.

  MSGT. R. KOROVEC – PLT SGT, 3RD SHOCK

  She wore marine blacks without the dress jacket, sleeves rolled up on forearms corded with muscle and old burn scars. Her hair was a short, practical cut, the color of iron shavings. The lines at the corners of her eyes were carved more by squinting into smoke than smiling.

  As Theta-3’s trickle merged with the gathered marines, Korovec pushed off the wall.

  “Form it up,” she called. “Let’s pretend you’ve stood in a hallway before.”

  They compressed into something like formation: loose rows, nobody quite shoulder to shoulder but close enough that Kaden could feel warm breath on the back of his neck. Navarro ended up at his right. Tanaka was a slab of presence somewhere ahead, Vos a lean piece of negative space off to the left, eyes flicking from hatch to overhead pipes as if cataloging them.

  Kaden caught a quick glance from Vos: pale eyes, assessing. Then Vos looked away, fingers ticking idle patterns against the dataport on his wrist.

  Korovec waited until the straggler tags stopped moving on her HUD.

  “Third Shock,” she said. Her voice had a rasp to it, like someone had sanded it down years ago and never bothered to polish it again. “You’ve already met Captain Gaunt and Lieutenant Okafor. I’m Master Sergeant Korovec. I’m the part in between.”

  A few people chuckled. It sounded nervous.

  “My job is to make sure Okafor orders actually make it into your thick skulls and onto the deck,” she said. “My other job is to make sure Captain Gaunt doesn’t decide you’re wasting air and pod mass.”

  Kaden shifted his weight. The deck felt suddenly more solid under his boots.

  “Third Shock is five squads,” Korovec went on. “Theta-1 through Theta-5. You’ve all got your tags by now. Theta-1 and Theta-2, you already know how to get to your holes. Theta-4, you’ll be with me after this. Today’s about the ones we just scraped together from what Erebus left and what the Academy vomited into my inbox.”

  There was no heat in the word Academy, just a flat assessment.

  “Theta-3 and Theta-5,” she said. “Those are my problem children.”

  Someone near the back snorted. Korovec’s gaze snapped that way; the sound died.

  “Here’s how this works,” she said. “This deck is Third Shock’s home. You don’t piss in the corners. You don’t carve stupid shit into the bulkheads. You don’t get drunk enough to fall down the stairs. You show up where your AR path tells you, when it tells you. You keep your gear squared, your weapons clean, and your stats better than the last time Aurora checked.”

  A small note slid softly into Kaden’s vision.

  PERSONAL STATUS – UPDATED

  NODE: HIS VALIANT (VAL-329)

  Korovec kept going.

  “You want to treat this like an extension of the Academy? You’ll find yourself babysitting cargo scanners on some rear-line tug in three months. You want to treat it like a stage to prove whatever half-broken thing you think you’re making up for? You’ll burn out before the first op. You treat it like work that matters, you might see a couple more corridor mouths than your file says you should.”

  Her gaze swept the gathered marines, lingered a heartbeat longer on the rookies—on Kaden, Navarro, the cluster that still stood a little too straight, boots a little too new.

  “You will run,” she said. “Up these halls, down them, through them. You will learn every ladder and shortcut between here and the pods. You will run sims until your eyes blur. You will do maintenance until your fingers hurt. You will get shouted at less when you start doing it before I tell you to.”

  The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  Korovec jerked her chin toward the hatch behind her. Someone had stenciled 3RD SHOCK across it in white paint that had been touched up more than once. Below that, in smaller letters, someone else had added:

  VALIANT'S BAD DECISIONS

  The add-on had been painted over and repainted enough that the layers showed.

  “This is our access to the marine spaces,” Korovec said. “Locker rooms, showers, bunks, ready rooms, chapel, and the gym you will come to hate. Theta-3, follow your blue line to your squad bay and report to Staff Sergeant Jax once you’ve stowed your trash. Theta-5, same deal with Staff Sergeant Moreau. Theta-4, you’re with me. I’ll show you your hole.”

  She paused.

  “One last thing,” she said. “There’s a wall near the chapel with names on it. You walk past it every time you go up to pods or down to services. You don’t have to read them. You will anyway. Just remember that every name up there is someone who thought they had more time than they did. Act accordingly.”

  She stepped aside.

  “Get out of my hallway,” Korovec said.

  The blue AR path brightened in Kaden’s HUD, leading through the hatch and down a branch to the right. A green line split off in the other direction for Theta-5. Other colors bled away toward other decks.

  Navarro blew out a breath she’d been holding.

  “I like her,” she said.

  “She scares me,” Kaden said.

  “That’s what I like.”

  They followed the blue line.

  Inside the hatch, the corridor narrowed again, the deck plates changing underfoot to a grated composite that rang differently with every step. The first side room Kaden passed was a locker space, its doors propped open: rows of storage units in various states of regulation compliance, a faint sting of solvent and old sweat seeping from inside.

  Further along, the hum of a shower block floated out, followed by the bark of someone telling someone else to stop singing. The air smelled faintly of damp towels and industrial cleaner.

  Theta-3’s blue path split off down a side passage, then terminated in front of a wide hatch marked with a simple stenciled label:

  THETA-3 – SQUAD BAY

  Someone had added, in marker below it:

  TRY NOT TO DIE

  The ship’s cleaning bots had half-heartedly tried to scrub it off; the words were faded but legible.

  The hatch was open.

  Inside, the squad bay was bigger than Kaden had expected and smaller than he’d hoped. Two tiers of bunks lined the walls, with integrated storage drawers beneath. A central table sat bolted to the deck, its surface a holo-projector waiting for input. Along one wall, a rack of armor stands and weapon mounts waited empty, tags hovering faintly over them: NAME: UNASSIGNED.

  Not entirely empty. Some lockers had names already etched into their surfaces, either laser-marked or scratched in by hand.

  Kaden’s HUD tagged a few immediately.

  LCPL. K. TANAKA – ASSIGNED

  CPL. E. VOS – ASSIGNED

  Between them were gaps where other names had been removed. Some laser etching had been smoothed over, locker faces resurfaced. Others still bore faint ghosts of letters where someone had tried to scrape them off and given up.

  Kaden’s name appeared over an empty bunk halfway down the left side.

  PVT. K. MERCER – ASSIGNED

  Navarro’s popped into existence two down from his. Across the bay, Vos stepped forward to drop a small duffel on a bunk under his tag, giving everything a brief survey that suggested he was comparing it to some internal checklist.

  Tanaka moved with more deliberation. He slung his bag at the foot of his assigned bunk and set it down carefully, like the deck might object if he slammed it. As he did, his HUD tag flickered for a moment, cross-referencing past unit data.

  PREVIOUS ASSIGNMENT: EPSILON-2 / 3RD SHOCK

  OP LOG: EREBUS – SURVIVOR

  The extra line faded back into the tag’s idle state.

  Kaden stepped up to his own bunk and dropped his medical pack. The mattress had a little more give than the Academy’s; the walls, a little more personality. Someone had carved a small, crude Opp silhouette into the metal above one bunk, complete with exaggerated talons and a beak they didn’t actually have. Someone else had scribbled a correction next to it: NO BEAKS, DUMBASS.

  He let his fingers rest on the edge of the frame a moment, grounding himself.

  STATUS: IN QUARTERS – THETA-3

  AURORA OVERLAY: IDLE

  Behind him, footsteps approached. He turned.

  Jax stood in the hatchway, hands still clasped behind her back.

  Without the stage and the lighting, she seemed smaller somehow, but denser. Her gaze swept the bay, taking in the clutter of bags, half-open drawers, marines in various stages of unpacking.

  When her eyes passed over Tanaka, there was a subtle shift, something like recognition that had nothing to do with HUD tags. Tanaka straightened a little, spine unconsciously bracing as if answering an old, familiar presence. They didn’t greet each other. They didn’t need to. They already moved like people who’d shared bad corridors before.

  Jax stepped inside, and the room instinctively tightened.

  “All right,” she said. “Welcome to Theta-3’s hole.”

  No one laughed.

  Jax nodded once, as if that was the correct reaction.

  “You’ve got fifteen minutes to claim your rack and stuff your life into whatever drawers you can find,” she said. “After that, we line it up, and you tell me what you are.”

  She walked over to the armor racks and rested one hand on the nearest stand.

  “This is where your kit lives,” Jax said. “By the end of this week, you’ll be able to step into it in the dark in under ninety seconds without putting your plates on backwards. Until then, don’t touch it without me or Tanaka watching you.”

  Tanaka grunted an acknowledgment. It wasn’t loud, but it had the rhythm of something they’d done before, a call-and-response that predated Kaden’s presence on the ship.

  Jax’s mouth twitched, almost imperceptibly.

  She looked back at them.

  “Platoon Sergeant Korovec told you about the names on the wall,” Jax said. “You’ll walk past them soon enough. Some of those names used to be on these lockers. Some of them used to snore in these bunks. Some of them are why you’re standing where you are instead of on some other ship.”

  Her gaze brushed over the resurfaced locker faces. Kaden saw a flicker of something in her expression, gone almost before he could name it.

  “You don’t need their stories yet,” she said. “You just need to know they existed, they did their jobs, and now you’re here.”

  She nodded toward the doorway.

  “Fifteen minutes,” she repeated. “Unpack. Piss, drink water, whatever. Then we form up in two ranks down the middle of this bay, and you tell me what Aurora thinks you’re good for, what you know you’re good for, and what you actually are. Those aren’t always the same thing.”

  She turned to go, then paused in the hatch and looked back, meeting Kaden’s eyes for a heartbeat.

  “Mercer,” she said.

  His spine snapped straighter instinctively.

  “Yes, Staff Sergeant?”

  “You’re not a cadet anymore,” Jax said. “You’re a medic in my squad. Stow your bag like one.”

  Heat crawled up the back of his neck. He looked down and realized he’d just dropped his pack at the foot of the bunk, straps tangled, contents bulging awkwardly.

  “Yes, Staff Sergeant,” he said again.

  Jax left without comment, footsteps fading into the corridor.

  Navarro waited until she was gone before leaning over.

  “At least she didn’t call you ‘kid,’” she said, voice low. “She’s already got your name, your file, and your squad. We never had a chance.”

  “At least she didn’t call me ‘problem,’” Kaden muttered.

  Navarro snorted and turned back to her own bunk.

  He grabbed his pack, hauled it up onto the mattress, and started stuffing his life into the drawers Aurora had assigned him. The motion was automatic: spare uniforms folded, personal kit wedged into corners, medical manuals slid into the narrow shelf above the bed like a nervous compulsion.

  In the background, he could hear the others moving.

  Tanaka’s armor plates thumped dully as he tested the fit on the stand’s clamps with a practiced hand, movements economical, like he’d done this on more than one ship. Vos cursed softly under his breath at a locker that stuck halfway, then kicked it shut when it finally gave. Navarro hummed tunelessly as she lined up her boots under the bunk precisely, then knocked them slightly out of alignment just to make herself re-adjust them.

  Kaden finished shoving the last of his socks into a drawer and closed it with more force than he meant to.

  Fifteen minutes, Jax had said.

  Then they’d stand in the middle of this room, under lockers that still remembered other names, and he’d have to say out loud what he was.

  He pulled up his status sheet with a blink.

  NAME: MERCER, KADEN

  TIER: 1

  LEVEL: 2

  CLASS: COMBAT MEDIC (SHOCK OUTFIT)

  PHY: 6

  AGI: 4

  COG: 7

  RES: 6

  AP: 5

  SKILLS:

  – FIELD STABILIZE – (R1)

  TRAITS:

  – TRAUMA RESPONSE –

  It looked small to him. Not wrong—just light, like an underweighted pack before someone started throwing extra ammo and responsibility into it.

  Small or not, it was what he had.

  He closed the sheet, rolled his shoulders, and glanced at Navarro.

  “You ready for story time?” she asked.

  “No,” Kaden said. “You?”

  “Absolutely not,” she said. “Let’s go impress the scary lady anyway.”

  He snorted despite himself.

  The ship hummed quietly around them, old and listening.