The compartment felt different once Jax left.
The hum of the ship didn’t change. The lights didn’t dim. Aurora didn’t flash anything dramatic across his HUD. But without her standing there, without her weight leaning against the lockers, the air seemed to loosen.
Navarro scooped the cards back together, shuffling them one-handed.
“Ten minutes,” she said. “Then stretching. I don’t want her showing up and catching us mid-slouch.”
“You’re always mid-slouch,” Vos said.
“That’s my secret,” Navarro said. “I’m never not slouching.”
Tanaka pushed himself up with a quiet grunt. “I’ll hit the head before Jax decides bathroom breaks are a luxury,” he said, ducking out.
Vos tapped Kaden’s boot with the deck. “You in for another hand?” he asked.
Kaden glanced at the timer.
ETA to target corridor: 02:28:44
“In a minute,” he said. “Going to grab some water. I’ll be back.”
“That’s what they all say,” Vos said. “Then they come back and take my socks.”
“That’s the dream,” Navarro said.
Kaden stood, plates shifting, med harness pulling on his shoulders. He scooped his helmet up by the rim, more habit than need, and stepped into the main passage.
The corridor outside their barracks was busier than it had any right to be for a ship in slip. Marines, techs, and ship’s crew moved past in ones and twos, some in full armor, others in station grays with sidearms clipped on. No one hurried. No one dawdled. There was a rhythm to the way people walked that said everyone knew exactly how much time they had and what they meant to do with it.
He cut toward the nearest water station, let the dispenser spit lukewarm fluid into a bulb, and drank. It didn’t help the dryness at the back of his throat, not really, but it gave his hands something to do.
He thought about going straight back.
Instead, he took a left at the junction.
Valiant’s interior was starting to map itself out in his bones without need for Aurora’s overlays. Down two ladders, past the bulkhead with the faint scorch mark where someone had gotten too creative with a training sim’s explosive breaching charge, around the corner where the deck plates always squeaked just enough to be annoying.
There was an alcove just off a main spine, a little pocket with a bench bolted to the wall and a recessed terminal nobody seemed to use unless they needed to check duty rosters on their way to something else. From here, the traffic noise was muffled. You could still hear the ship, though—the deep, steady rumble of drives working against whatever Aurora called slipspace.
Kaden dropped onto the bench and rested his elbows on his knees.
For a moment, he just sat there, helmet in his hands, listening.
He thought about sending a message.
Aurora could queue a packet to Earth, ride it back through whichever chain the Hegemony had set up for the Valiant. It wouldn’t arrive fast. Nothing that far ever did. But he could record something. A face, a voice. Proof of life.
Proof of something.
He touched his tongue to the roof of his mouth, swallowed, and brought up his personal interface.
[AURORA//PERSONAL NODE]
Messages – Drafts: 0
Outgoing queue: EMPTY
The last packet he’d sent was before they left Eridani. He’d kept it simple.
Hey. I’m shipping out with my unit. They’re good people. Ship’s solid. Don’t worry. I’ll ping you when I can.
He hadn’t said where they were going. He hadn’t said “the corridor we lost six weeks ago.” You didn’t put that sort of thing in a civilian packet unless you wanted some censor flagging your file.
Dad would know anyway. Anyone watching the feeds would. It wasn’t hard to connect “Task Force Harrow” and “Valiant” and “return to contested space.”
Lira would pretend not to read too much into it, then message him three times in a row asking if he was eating.
“Hey, Dad, Lira,” he said quietly, testing the words in the empty alcove.
The terminal didn’t start recording. Aurora wasn’t eavesdropping for once. It was just him and metal and the hum.
What was he supposed to say? Hey, if I die out here, it probably won’t be instantly? Hey, remember when Lira fell down the stairs and I somehow didn’t completely choke? Good news, someone has decided that’s a marketable skill now.
He huffed air out through his nose, not quite a laugh.
He shut the message interface instead.
[AURORA//PERSONAL NODE]
Messages – Drafts: 0
Later. After the drop. After they knew if there was an “after” worth sending.
He shifted his focus.
“Aurora,” he murmured. “Request medic refresher. Field trauma. Combat environment.”
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There was a heartbeat of stillness, and then his HUD softened at the edges.
[AURORA//TRAINING]
Module: FIELD STABILIZE (R1) – Applied Scenarios
Progress: 63% →
Mode: Simulation Overlay (PASSIVE)
Begin? Y/N
He confirmed with a blink.
The alcove stayed the same. The ship’s hum stayed the same. No sudden shift to a white room or a fabricated battlefield. But little ghost-images began to ghost over his ordinary view, transparent and faint—training prompts threading through the edges of reality.
A figure appeared in the corner of his vision, an outline more than a person. Armor, prone, a pulsing red marker at the thigh.
CASE 1:
GSW – Femoral Region
Environment: Corridor // Under Fire
“Walk it,” Aurora suggested, its text quiet and unintrusive.
Kaden exhaled slowly.
“Assess,” he said under his breath. “Check for scene hazards. Fire lanes. Cover. Get them behind something if they’re exposed. Then tourniquet high and tight. Sealant after if there’s time, not before.”
The ghost of a corridor built itself faintly over the bulkhead opposite. The prone outline behind a jagged suggestion of cover. He saw himself there in his mind’s eye—diving in, one hand on armor, one dragging the tourniquet from his harness, clamping down hard enough to stop blood and maybe break through whatever panic was in the patient’s eyes.
“Time to intervention?” Aurora asked.
“Under ten seconds to first pressure,” Kaden answered. “Longer to move them if the corridor’s hot.”
ACCEPTABLE.
Prioritize tourniquet if exsanguination risk is critical.
Movement under suppressive fire if available.
The phantom scene faded, replaced by another outline. Chest this time. Higher up. Different angle.
CASE 2:
GSW – Thoracic
Environment: Compartment // Limited Cover
Thoracic wounds. Jensen, coughing blood that had no business being in his mouth. The way Kaden’s hands had slipped.
“Pressure,” he murmured. “Sealant. Needle decompression if we’ve got the kit and training. Monitor airway.”
He didn’t have needles yet. That was higher-level kit, reserved for people Aurora trusted more.
“Stabilize to move,” he said. “Not to fight.”
The text in his HUD updated.
FIELD STABILIZE (R1) – PATTERN RECOGNITION
63% → 64%
Barely a nudge. But a nudge.
“Aurora,” he said quietly, “show me prior performance.”
A small panel unfolded in the corner of his vision, translucent enough not to blot out the real world.
TRAINING NODE: ACADEMY // LIVE-FIRE SIM
Stress markers: ELEVATED
Fine motor control: WITHIN BAND
Outcome: FATALITY (EXTERNAL CAUSE)
Jensen. They’d scrubbed the name from the report, but he could see it anyway.
Observation:
Operator maintained functional motor control under acute stress.
Recommendation:
Increased load-out responsibility viable.
Aurora didn’t do sympathy. It did math. He stared at the text until it blurred.
“I don’t care about viable,” Kaden said under his breath. “I care about not watching it happen again.”
There was no answer. Just the next case.
He walked through half a dozen scenarios in his head: burns from a ruptured conduit, shrapnel to the neck, blast overpressure, a crushed limb in a partially collapsed corridor. Aurora prompted. He answered. Sometimes the system nudged his answer with a quiet correction. Sometimes it just logged the response and slid the progression bar one more fraction of a percent.
By the time he blinked the training overlay away, his eyes felt dry and there was a faint, familiar ache in the back of his skull—the kind that came from focusing too hard on HUD prompts for too long.
[AURORA//TRAINING]
Module: FIELD STABILIZE (R1)
Progress: 67%
Four points. Not much. But it was something.
He leaned back against the cool metal of the alcove wall and closed his eyes for a moment, letting the ship’s hum run through him. If he listened, he could almost convince himself he heard the difference between ordinary cruise and a war footing. There was a tension in the way the decks vibrated, a readiness.
He thought about Lira again. About her head in his lap at the bottom of a stairwell, blood in her hair, his shirt wadded up under his palms. About Dad’s face when the med techs had said, He did good. Kept her calm. Kept pressure on.
He hadn’t had Aurora then. He’d just had his mother’s old words and a scared twelve-year-old’s stubbornness.
Now he had an implant. Stats. A trait that told him his brain wouldn’t freeze when the world went sideways.
Trauma Response.
It sounded clinical. Neat. The reality had been Jensen’s face.
“Field Stabilize, Trauma Response,” he muttered. “That’s the kit. That’s what I’ve got.”
PHY 6 let him drag people. RES 6 kept his head from shattering under stress. COG 7 helped remember steps when adrenaline wanted to wipe the slate clean. AP 5 gave him a handful of chances to push his skill hard before he had to rely on pure muscle memory.
It didn’t feel like enough.
It had to be.
A pair of marines jogged past the alcove, boots ringing on the deck. Someone laughed down the corridor. Someone else cursed at a locker that refused to open.
Kaden let his head thump gently back against the wall.
“You’re not here to erase death,” Instructor Corin’s voice came back, from all the way across light-years and years. “You’re here to give people a chance they wouldn’t have had without you.”
He’d believed her then. He still did. Mostly.
He opened his eyes and checked the timer again.
ETA to target corridor: 01:52:18
Almost half an hour gone without him noticing. Good. Time that didn’t stretch.
He got to his feet. His knees popped softly under the armor. He clipped his helmet back to his belt and started down the corridor toward the barracks.
As he walked, he passed one of Valiant’s bulkheads where the paint had worn away down at boot level, a thin strip of metal polished by years of people walking the same path. The ship had been doing this longer than he’d been alive. Boarding, retreating, taking hits, giving them.
Jax had lost a Theta on this hull. Tanaka had lost Epsilon-2 in the same corridor they were going back to. Vos had lost Demidov on Ramses. Kaden had lost Jensen in a training bay.
He wasn’t special. He wasn’t cursed. He was just next.
By the time he stepped back into the barracks, Navarro was on the deck, touching her toes and swearing under her breath. Vos was half-heartedly stretching his arms, making faces at his own reflection in the dark screen of a powered-down terminal. Tanaka was doing slow, controlled squats in armor, shield propped nearby.
Navarro glanced up. “You disappear on us, Mercer?” she asked.
“Just went to argue with Aurora,” Kaden said.
“Who won?” Vos asked.
“Aurora,” Kaden said. “Obviously.”
Navarro groaned. “Hate that thing,” she said. “Love the AP, hate the commentary.”
Kaden stepped into their little circle and started mimicking Tanaka’s movements, feeling the pull in his thighs, the weight of his gear.
Two hours, give or take.
He couldn’t control the fleet. He couldn’t control what kind of hull would be waiting at the end of the lane, or how many guns it had left, or what the Opp would do when Hegemony boarding pods slammed into their skin.
He could control this: muscle memory. Skill prompts. The way his hands would know where the injectors were without him looking, how tightly a tourniquet needed to bite, how to keep his breathing even when Anchor washed over him and the world tried to narrow to the size of a wound.
He focused on that and counted reps and let the timer run down in his peripheral vision.
