Kaden’s bunk vibrated just enough that he could feel the hum in his back teeth.

  [HIS VALIANT//NAVIGATION]

  Slip Transit: ACTIVE

  ETA to target corridor: 04:37:09

  Four and a half hours. Aurora had dropped the number into his HUD the second Valiant finished her slide into slip. It had been longer than a blink and shorter than a breath: a flicker in his vision, a lurch in his gut, and then this—steady hum, wrong-feeling air, and a timer counting down to whatever waited when they fell out of the lane.

  He rolled onto his side and propped himself up on one elbow. The barracks looked the same as always: two rows of bunks, lockers, a narrow strip of deck between. With slip engaged and orders given, it felt smaller. Like the walls had leaned in a little.

  Navarro sprawled on the bunk opposite, armor still on but helmet hanging from the bedframe by its chinstrap. One boot was on the deck, the other resting on the rail. She flipped a plastic card between her fingers, snapping it from knuckle to knuckle, the little click-click-click cutting through the ship’s rumble.

  Vos sat on the floor with his back against Kaden’s bunk, legs stretched out, ankles crossed. His helmet rested beside him. Wasp slept in its cradle on his harness, status lights dim. Tanaka had claimed the lower bunk in the corner, shoulder against the bulkhead, long legs extended, shield propped upright within easy reach.

  No one had said “stand down.” Jax had walked them back from the bay and told them they had a few hours before things got louder. Helmets off. Plates loosened if they needed it. Stay close to your kit. Stay reachable.

  Navarro bounced the card off the underside of the upper bunk, caught it, bounced it again.

  “Four and a half hours,” she said. “We’ve spent more time than that getting yelled at about posture.”

  “Posture’s important,” Vos said. “You want to die slouching?”

  “You’re going to die slouching,” Navarro said. “I’m going to die heroically, probably saving your ass.”

  Vos tilted his head back against the bunk frame. “You hear that, Kenji?” he asked. “Talia’s got our obits drafted already.”

  Tanaka grunted. “As long as they spell my name right,” he said.

  The timer in Kaden’s HUD ticked: 04:36:11. He dragged his eyes away from it. Staring at the numbers would not slow them down.

  “You all right?” Navarro asked, catching his look. The card vanished into her palm. “You’ve been doing the thousand-meter stare at nothing for a solid minute.”

  “Just watching Aurora count,” Kaden said. “Feels… short.”

  “Short?” Vos said. “Four hours of this?” He waved a hand vaguely, encompassing the hum, the not-quite-normal gravity, the stale air. “Plenty of time to get bored out of your skull.”

  “Short compared to what I thought an operation like this would be,” Kaden said. “I always figured we’d spend weeks in transit, working up to it. Now it’s: ‘Oh, by the way, the corridor is right there. Hold tight.’”

  Navarro snorted. “Welcome to Andromeda,” she said. “All the waiting happens on the other side of the galaxy.”

  Vos rolled his shoulders, armor creaking. “You’d rather have three weeks to stew about how you might die instead of four hours?” he asked.

  Kaden thought about it. “No,” he said. “Not really.”

  “Then cards,” Navarro said, dropping lightly off her bunk. “If I’m going to stress about the future, I’d rather be taking your laundry while I do it.”

  She bent, scooped up the rest of the deck from under her mattress, and slapped it into Vos’s chest. He caught it automatically.

  “I didn’t agree to this,” Vos said.

  “You didn’t have to,” Navarro said. “Democracy is dead. Shuffle.”

  Vos sighed, but his fingers were already moving, splitting the deck and bridging it, letting the cards snap together. The sound was familiar. Comforting, in its own way.

  Tanaka watched the cards, not moving to join. “I’m out,” he said. “Not digging myself deeper after the last round.”

  Navarro gasped. “Afraid to lose socks, Kenji?”

  “I like my socks,” Tanaka said. “I like not doing laundry more.”

  Kaden slid off his bunk to sit on the edge, boots planted on the deck. “I’m in,” he said. “I owe Vos a chance to win back at least one pair of shorts.”

  Vos pointed at him with the deck. “This,” he said, “this is squad spirit.”

  He dealt with easy, practiced motions, three hands fanned onto the deck between them.

  They played. It wasn't serious, not really; laundry markers were scribbled IOUs on scrap paper, not official anything. Vos overplayed his hands and talked too much. Navarro was aggressive when she smelled weakness, cautious when she did not. Kaden stuck to the math, counting odds in his head without wanting to, watching patterns.

  He won a hand. Lost the next two. Vos went on a brief streak of luck, then crashed it into the side of reality.

  “Unbelievable,” Vos said, staring at his latest losing hand. “This is why Aurora doesn’t give me a Luck stat. It’d embarrass both of us.”

  “Luck isn’t a stat,” Kaden said.

  “Exactly,” Vos said. “They didn’t even bother.”

  Navarro leaned back on her hands, grinning. “Maybe Aurora just hates you personally,” she said.

  “It’s mutual,” Vos said.

  The banter helped. The timer still ticked in the corner of Kaden’s vision, but it felt less like a noose and more like a metronome. Something to measure conversation against.

  After a few rounds, Navarro scooped the cards together and let them sit in a loose pile.

  “All right,” she said. “New game. We’re stuck in a box for four hours and change. Somebody say something real.” She tipped her chin toward Vos. "Tell me about what you were doing before Theta, Eden.”

  Vos made a face before saying, “You just decided my trauma was entertainment.”

  “Correct,” Navarro said. “Now spill.”

  Kaden glanced down at him. Vos’s usual smirk was off by a few degrees. His eyes flicked to the corner of his HUD, then away, as if checking the same timer Kaden was.

  “You want the short version?” Vos asked.

  “The version that keeps me from thinking about all the ways this ship can explode before we arrive,” Navarro said. “Yes.”

  Vos let his head thunk gently back against the bunk frame and stared at the ceiling for a second.

  “Ramses was a destroyer,” he said. “Escorts, patrols, convoy work. Different sector. Same war. I was a tech in her marine contingent. Squad Demidov. Doors, locks, cameras. Wasp’s great-grandmother.”

  Kaden listened. He had heard “last squad” from Vos before, but never the whole thing.

  “We were riding shotgun for a convoy,” Vos went on. “Freighters, a tanker, some research tub command swore was important. Opp started poking. Light stuff at first. Fighters. Harassment fire. We pushed them off. Twice. Doctrine said they’d probed enough and go somewhere else.”

  He smiled without humor.

  “Doctrine was wrong,” he said. “Third contact, they brought heavier hulls into the lane. Ramses took a real hit. Lights flickered. My console lit up like a holiday and then half the board went dead.”

  Navarro’s fingers tightened around the deck. “You were in a systems bay?” she asked.

  “Yeah, the Opps boarded us,” Vos said. “Demidov and the others were three decks down, pushing toward a breach on one of the freighters. My job was simple: keep doors behaving. Open for them when they needed advance or fallback. Closed when Opp tried to flood through.”

  He rubbed at his wrist, where an interface port sat under the armor, hidden from view.

  “On paper, it was simple,” he said. “In practice, my panel started throwing error codes and Aurora priority flags faster than I could read them. Doors that were supposed to be red showed gray. Atmos alarms blinked without context. And my squad’s tags on the overlay…”

  He went quiet for a moment.

  “Started blinking,” he said. “Then fading. One at a time.”

  Kaden felt a knot tighten in his stomach.

  “You couldn’t get the doors open,” he said.

  If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

  “I couldn’t get the doors to do anything,” Vos said. “I had four bulkheads and six corridor doors in my slice. Squad Demidov on one side, Opp tags on the other. I threw commands at the system until my fingers cramped. Best I got was a partial cycle before the grid dumped the request. Power was being diverted to keep Ramses from tearing herself open.”

  Navarro swallowed. “How many?” she asked, voice low.

  “Eight,” Vos said. “Squad plus a support pair. They died in corridors I could see on my board. I could hear pieces over comms. But when I hit ‘open’ or ‘close,’ the panel just stared back at me.”

  Kaden remembered Jensen on the deck in the Academy sim. The feeling of not being enough. Of being there and still failing. He could not imagine adding a dead console between himself and the people he was trying to help.

  “They told you it wasn’t your fault,” he said.

  “Yeah,” Vos said. “Had a whole report. Power failure trees. Aurora’s triage. Words like ‘regrettable’ and ‘unavoidable.’ They pulled me off Ramses, stamped ‘combat experienced’ on my file, and shipped me to another squad that needed a tech.”

  “Eden,” Navarro said, “you know it wasn’t—”

  “My fault,” Vos finished with her. “Sure. Brain knows that. Somewhere further back there’s a little voice that still goes ‘if you were better, they’d be here.’ That one’s harder to shut up.”

  Tanaka shifted, armor whispering against the bulkhead. “You came through for us,” he said. “In that last evaluation. Doors opened when they needed to.”

  “And we’re still breathing,” Navarro added. “That has to count for something.”

  Vos shrugged one shoulder. “We’ll see how I do when the bullets are real,” he said. “So far, all my worst days happened in corridors that didn’t have you three in them.”

  “Four,” Navarro said.

  Vos glanced up.

  “Jax counts,” she said.

  As if summoned, the compartment door hissed open. Jax stepped in, helmet clipped to her belt, a datapad in one hand. She took in the scene—cards on the deck, helmets in easy reach, armor still on—with a quick sweep and didn’t find anything to yell about, because she just moved to lean a shoulder against the locker bank near Tanaka’s bunk.

  “Keep going,” she said. “I like hearing which parts of your reports you’ve edited to make yourselves sound better.”

  Vos groaned. “Sergeant, do you have to lurk that quietly?” he said. “My heart’s going to give out before the Opp even looks at us.”

  “It’s good for your cardio,” Jax said, tapping the pad against her thigh. “What were we up to? Ramses? Demidov?”

  “Demidov died while Aurora prioritized hull integrity over my section,” Vos said.

  “Aurora didn’t prioritize,” Jax said. “It triaged. You were an asset. The ship was an asset. It picked the option with the higher success chance. That’s what it does.”

  “Exactly the kind of comforting clarification I was hoping for,” Vos said.

  Navarro eyed Jax. “You were there?” she asked.

  “Not on Ramses,” Jax said. “Different ship. Different lane. Same kind of math.”

  Her tone made it clear she wasn’t exaggerating.

  Navarro’s gaze slid back to Tanaka. “All right,” she said. “Eden got his turn. Kenji, yours. You were on Valiant when the corridor went bad the first time, right?”

  Tanaka’s eyes flicked to Jax briefly, then back to the opposite wall.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Epsilon-2. Heavy squad. Here on the Valiant. Not shock though. We went in when Command decided holding wasn’t enough anymore.”

  Kaden listened. He knew the broad strokes: a push into the corridor, a line that broke, ships that did not come home. Names on a wall. But he had never heard Tanaka’s version.

  “We boarded an Opp hull,” Tanaka said. “Not the one they put in the recruitment vids. Another one in the same mess. Job on paper was simple. Meet Epsilon-1 at a junction, hit a power node, take their guns offline long enough for the fleet to chew a hole.”

  He folded his arms loosely, every movement controlled.

  “Epsilon-1 got mauled early,” he said. “Heard enough on the net to know they weren’t going to make the rendezvous. We didn’t see them. Just their tags going dark. Epsilon-2 took point. Same drill you’ve seen in sim. Shield up. Push. Clear. Repeat.”

  He paused, eyes unfocused for a moment.

  “We hit an intersection that felt wrong,” he said. “Too clean. No scorch marks. No debris. Opp had been messy everywhere else. Here, it looked like the corridor in a training vid.”

  “Trap,” Navarro said.

  Tanaka nodded once. “I said as much,” he said. “Sergeant told me to quit dragging my feet. Ordered the push.”

  He tapped his chest with two fingers, just above where his Pain Conditioning tag would sit.

  “That’s the thing about traits like mine,” he said. “You can take more punishment. Stay on your feet longer. Keep moving when somebody else would drop. Good, until you walk into the kind of hit you should have gone down from and you don’t.”

  Kaden felt his mouth go dry. “What happened?” he asked.

  “They’d lined the walls and ceiling,” Tanaka said. “Charges, something else tied in. When the first rank crossed halfway, everything went white. Sound cut out. My shield took most of it on my side. Armor took the rest.”

  He looked down at his hands.

  “I stayed upright,” he said. “Pushed forward. Two steps, three. Couldn’t hear anything but my own breathing. Vision narrowed. Thought, if I can just get a little further, maybe I can pull us out.”

  He drew in a slow breath.

  “When the ringing stopped, I realized no one was behind me,” he said. “Turned around. Epsilon-2 was on the deck. All of them. HUD said flatlines. No tags left blinking.”

  No one spoke for a few seconds. The hum of the ship filled the gap.

  “I dragged two of them backward by their harnesses,” Tanaka went on. “Armor was slagged. Aurora flagged them as gone before I moved them three meters. Med readouts flat. Most of the rest of that op is a blur. What I remember is the intersection. The smell. The way my own vitals kept telling me I should have fallen down with them.”

  Navarro’s voice was very small. “How’d you get out?” she asked.

  “Pain Conditioning doesn’t just keep you up,” Tanaka said. “Makes it hard to convince your legs to stop. I kept moving until someone higher up decided Epsilon-2 was ‘combat ineffective’ and pulled what was left back. Then my body listened and dropped.”

  Jax watched him while he talked, eyes narrowed a fraction. When he finished, she looked away first, to the far wall.

  “Command said ‘circumstances beyond control’ in that report too,” Navarro said.

  “Command likes that phrase,” Jax said. “Looks better on a slide than ‘we underestimated the enemy and overestimated ourselves.’”

  “Sergeant,” Kaden said carefully, “you said you had a shock squad before us.”

  Jax’s jaw tightened.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Kappa-1 wasn’t born whole out of some admiral’s forehead. Different faces, same tags. They trained. They bled. They went downrange.”

  “And?” Navarro asked.

  “And they didn’t all come back,” Jax said. “Some of their names are on the wall. Some are scattered across hulls that never made it home. You don’t need the after-action details. You just need to understand this is not a fresh start for this ship. It’s another round.”

  Vos studied her. “Is that why you ride us so hard?” he asked. “Because of them?”

  Jax looked at him for a long moment. “You know what Theta-3 is on a roster, Vos?” she asked. “It’s a slot. Command fills it. If it goes empty, they fill it again. From their perspective, you’re interchangeable. From mine, you’re not.”

  She tapped the datapad lightly against her leg.

  “I push you because the only part of this I get to influence is how hard you are to kill,” she said. “I don’t pick the targets. I don’t plot the course. I get five marines and however much time Aurora gives me to make you into a squad. That’s my slice. I take it seriously.”

  Tanaka gave a small nod, like he had heard a version of this before. Navarro’s expression softened at the edges.

  “So we’re not special,” Vos said. “Good to know.”

  “You’re special to the extent that you’re mine,” Jax said. “Which means I care if you walk back up the ramp, and Command cares if I deliver results. That’s the overlap. Everything else is someone else’s spreadsheet.”

  Kaden thought of his father. Of Lira. Of the message packet he’d recorded before embarkation: I’m fine. The ship’s solid. Don’t worry. He had not told them about Jensen. Or about the way Jax watched them in sims, like she was measuring their odds against a mental list of the dead.

  “We all left something behind,” he said quietly.

  Navarro snorted. “You mean our legal right to say no?” she asked.

  “Besides that,” Kaden said. “Family. Streets. Whatever life we thought we were going to have before Aurora started handing out stat blocks.”

  Vos gave a little half-shrug. “I traded a coding track in a climate-controlled facility for a ship that shoots back,” he said. “At eighteen it sounded romantic. Now I miss chairs that don’t move. But I don’t miss wondering if what I’m doing matters.”

  “My mother left first,” Kaden said. The words felt strange in his mouth, like they belonged to a quieter room. “Conscription sweep. Navy med. Hegemony sent one letter, then nothing. Dad and I never saw her again.”

  Navarro shifted on her bunk, expression gentler. “That why you went medic?” she asked.

  “Partly,” Kaden said. “Partly because I watched someone die and didn’t know what to do. Didn’t want that to be the story next time.”

  Navarro turned the card in her fingers, staring at the back. “My parents run a parts stall,” she said. “Or did. Dockside market under a dome that leaks every rainy season. Conscription grabbed me the second Aurora said I was available. They sent a message saying they were proud. I told them I’d send money when I could.”

  She snorted once. “Still waiting for Aurora to unlock the ‘make enough to send home’ feature,” she said.

  Tanaka looked at his hands. “My father died in the Advent riots,” he said. “Mother did her time in logistics. I didn’t leave much behind. Just a name on a roster in some district office. Trade-up from that is… arguable.”

  Jax listened, expression unreadable.

  “Sergeant?” Navarro asked. “What’d you leave?”

  Jax’s lips thinned. “Space in my schedule,” she said.

  Navarro frowned. “That’s not an answer.”

  “It’s the one you’re getting right now,” Jax said. “You want the full autobiography, survive a few more sorties. Maybe I’ll feel like sharing.”

  The timer dropped another minute.

  ETA to target corridor: 04:31:02

  “You’re allowed to miss what you left,” Jax said, voice softer. “Family. Streets. Jobs that didn’t involve boarding actions. You’re not allowed to let missing it get in the way of doing what you’re here for. You want to honor whatever’s behind you? Do the job in front of you well enough that you don’t get someone else’s kid killed.”

  Kaden met her eyes. “That’s the plan,” he said.

  “Plans go to hell on contact,” Jax said. “But it’s a start.”

  Vos made a face. “You realize that’s the closest thing to encouragement we’re going to get until after the op, right?”

  “You want more encouragement?” Jax asked. “Survive the op. I’ll think about it.”

  Navarro tossed the card she’d been worrying back into the deck. “I’ll take ‘don’t die’ as a standing order,” she said.

  “Good,” Jax said. “Because it is.”

  She pushed off the lockers.

  “Okafor pushed an updated block for the next couple hours,” she said. “Nothing heavy. No point burning you out before we drop. We’re killing time, not each other. Cards for another half-hour, then I want you doing something that looks like a warmup, not a wake.”

  “Yes, Sergeant,” they said.

  Jax nodded once and stepped back toward the door. “And if any of you start staring at that timer like it owes you money,” she added, “I’ll find something unpleasant to fill the hours with. You don’t need Aurora to tell you you’re getting closer. You’ll know when the ride starts to get rough.”

  The hatch slid shut behind her.

  Vos let out a breath. “She is absolutely terrified of losing us,” he said.

  “Good,” Navarro said. “Means she’s invested.”

  “Means we should be, too,” Tanaka said.

  Kaden watched the timer drop a few more seconds, then deliberately blinked the overlay smaller. It stayed in the corner of his vision, but not big enough to dominate.

  Four and a half hours. Cards. Stories. Light drills. Old ghosts and new worries.

  He could not control what waited at the end of the lane. He could control how ready his hands were when someone started bleeding.

  “Deal again,” he said.

  Vos picked up the deck. “One more round,” he said. “Then we stretch and pretend we’re not all picturing worst-case scenarios.”

  “Who says I’m pretending?” Navarro asked.

  Kaden let himself smile, just a little.