They stepped out of the blue and into white.

  The change was subtle at first, more a weight in the air than anything his HUD could quantify. The hum underfoot picked up a new color, deeper and tighter, like they’d walked from plumbing into pressure lines.

  The corridor beyond the heavy door wasn’t like the others. The walls were thicker, layered with armor and angled plating that made the passage feel narrower than it was. Conduits ran in tight, disciplined lines along the ceiling, every bundle buried under overlapping shields. No exposed cabling. No lazy routing. Everything here was meant to survive being shot.

  The deck was darker metal, its surface worn by countless boots. Faint scuff-trails ran dead center, like a ghost of every crew that had marched through here to service whatever fed the big guns outside.

  “Yeah,” Vos murmured. “This smells like weapons.”

  The sound agreed. The low background thrum he’d felt elsewhere on the ship was louder now, vibrating in Kaden’s boots and teeth. Not just energy. Potential. Something big and ugly waiting for someone to tell it where to go.

  “Same stack,” Jax said. “Tanaka front, Navarro right, Mercer left, Vos inside. Keep it tight. If they’ve got any sense, this is where they make us pay for coming this far.”

  Kaden shifted his grip on his SMG and fell into position. Tanaka’s shield filled the corridor ahead, a slab of composite and resolve. Navarro floated on his right, rifle just off the shield’s edge, ready to cut past. Kaden took the left, watching the other wall and the ceiling. Vos hugged the inside, closer to the panels, his attention flicking between the corridor and his HUD.

  After ten meters, the passage bent with the curve of something massive on their left. No side doors, just regular bulges of reinforced bulkhead, each banded and sealed. Status strips above them glowed a steady, sanitary white.

  “Node?” Jax asked.

  “Local only,” Vos said. “No nice big ship-map feed. But we’re hugging something major. You don’t waste this much armor on air.”

  The hum got louder the further they went. The kind of sound that made the skin between Kaden’s shoulder blades itch.

  White light bleached their armor down to shades of gray. Shadows pooled under boots and under Tanaka’s shield like oil.

  The deck shivered.

  Not the broad, rolling rumble of distant hits on Valiant’s hull. This was a quick, sharp tremor, like a muscle twitching under their feet.

  “Damage?” Navarro asked.

  “Nothing obvious,” Vos said. “But their power routing just flipped again. Something’s spooling up ahead.”

  They kept moving.

  The corridor widened just enough to give Tanaka a little more room to work the shield. Kaden used the space to adjust his own lane, making sure he had angle past the heavy if something burst out in front of them.

  Up ahead, his HUD showed a change in layout: a junction, a short straightaway, then a cross-corridor. The sort of place you put a checkpoint. Or a trap.

  “Incoming intersection,” Vos said. “Beyond that, I’m seeing a node Aurora thinks is some kind of control. Not main, but definitely talking to something important.”

  “Then that’s where we’re going,” Jax said.

  Kaden’s gaze flicked up to the ceiling as they approached a structural rib that jutted down from the left wall, forcing them right for a couple meters.

  Most of the panels overhead were uniform: matte, tight seams, conduit patterns regular and mirrored. But just past the rib, near the corridor centerline, one square of metal looked wrong.

  The seams around it were a shade wider. The surface carried a faint halo of heat-discoloration, like it had been pulled and reset. Nothing you’d notice if you weren’t looking for problems.

  He was.

  He opened his mouth.

  Tanaka beat him to it.

  The big man’s shoulders bunched. His pace stayed steady, but tension rolled down his back like a wave.

  “Sergeant,” he said, voice low. “This feels just like—”

  At the same time, Jax eased off her step, barely perceptible, like someone had caught her by the back of the harness. Her head tipped, eyes narrowing, as if she was tracking something none of their HUDs displayed.

  Kaden had seen that look before.

  Two weeks ago, in the evaluation: command sim, clean corridors, then that half-second where Jax had gone distant right before yelling at them to get down. A heartbeat later, a Reaver had kicked the doors in.

  Combat Intuition. Aurora nudging pattern recognition. Whatever it was, it was back.

  His skin crawled.

  “Anchor,” Tanaka breathed.

  [TANAKA – SKILL: SHIELD ANCHOR (R1) // ACTIVE]

  Kaden felt it in the way the heavy moved.

  Tanaka shifted his stance, boots grinding into the deck, weight dropping like he intended to weld himself to the hull. The shield dipped a little and bit into the metal at its lower edge, turning into a brace instead of just a wall.

  Jax’s voice followed, sharp and loud.

  “Brace!”

  She was already slamming herself against the wall as she said it, forearm over her faceplate, knees bent, body angled to ride blast instead of take it clean.

  Tanaka didn’t waste any time.

  He reached back one-handed, grabbed a fistful of Navarro’s harness, and yanked her in, collapsing down and forward. The shield curled over her as he wrapped himself around the rifleman like she was cargo he refused to let go.

  Kaden dropped his own weight, trying to tuck behind the thickest part of Tanaka’s armor, but he’d been a half-step too far off the line. Vos spun toward the nearest wall, trying to press flat against conduit that wasn’t meant for cover.

  The ceiling blew.

  The sound wasn’t like grenades or breaching charges. It was messier, uglier—a ripping crack of metal giving way, followed by the thunder of gas and dust being forced into a space that did not want them.

  Something heavy and invisible punched the air down the corridor.

  Kaden felt the pressure before he saw the debris. The air itself slammed onto his shoulders like a giant hand. Local gravity jerked sideways at the same time, Aurora-twisted to shove bodies where the Opp wanted them.

  Overhead, a panel disintegrated into a cloud of shards and vapor. The shaped blast funneled downward, smashing into Tanaka’s anchored shield with terrifying force.

  The impact sounded like a car crash inside a steel drum. The shield screamed, composite layers straining, a jagged crack splintering across its face. Tanaka grunted, boots sliding, then locking as Anchor dug in. He held, muscles and Aurora both refusing to let the blast roll him over Navarro.

  If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

  Kaden was outside the main cone.

  The wave hit him at an angle and picked him up like he weighed nothing.

  His feet left the deck. The world spun. White light, gray armor, Tanaka’s shield, the wrong ceiling panel.

  Then the wall hit him.

  His right shoulder took the first impact, armor taking some of it, not all. Pain burst down his side in a wide flare. His helmet bounced off metal a half second later, snapping his head sideways. His HUD exploded into static and nonsense glyphs.

  A whine roared up inside his head, drowning out everything. His left ear went almost completely dead, sound dropping to a faint, buried thump.

  There was a metallic bellow through the hull, a system alarm that felt more in bone than in ears. Red strips along the ceiling flashed once, twice, drowning the corridor in stuttering color.

  Then the blast doors fired.

  Heavy bulkheads dropped from ceiling to deck in staggered chunks, carving the corridor into sealed cells. One slammed down between Kaden and Tanaka, separating him from shield, heavy, and Jax in a single brutal stroke. Another crashed down behind him and Vos, killing the way back.

  Through the shrinking slice ahead, Kaden caught one last broken snapshot: Tanaka crouched low, shield bowed and blackened, Navarro tight underneath him; Jax against the far wall, already lifting her head, eyes alert and furious.

  Steel filled the gap. The blast door locked home with a boom that Kaden felt more through the deck than heard.

  The floor gave way under his boots.

  The structural rib that had hidden the side access had taken a bad bite of the blast. The deck segment anchored to it torn, bent, then failed. The slab under Kaden and Vos snapped loose and dropped half a meter, slamming into support framing beneath.

  They went with it.

  For a moment he was weightless again, stomach lurching. Then he hit the sloping segment hard, slid, and tumbled through a jagged break into a lower passage he hadn’t known existed.

  His shoulder hit another wall, then his hip, then his helmet. Vos crashed into his back, armor grinding against armor.

  They ended in a heap on a narrow deck, dust and heat washing over them like a second, smaller wave. Something above them boomed dully as the last blast door settled into place.

  Then the world steadied.

  His HUD flickered and reassembled itself in patches.

  [AURORA//CONNECTION – RESTORING HUD…]

  …

  [LOCAL MAPPING – RECONSTRUCTING]

  [SQUAD LINK – DEGRADED // PACKET LOSS: 81%]

  [MEDICAL NOTICE – MINOR CONCUSSION SUSPECTED]

  [LEFT EAR – TYMPANIC DAMAGE // HEARING REDUCED]

  [RIGHT SIDE – HAIRLINE RIB FRACTURE PROBABLE]

  He sucked in a breath. It hurt. A sharp, hot pain along his right side; but air went in and out. He did it again, slower. His head throbbed. His left ear registered almost nothing; the right was doing all the work.

  Suit integrity stayed green. No hull breach. No suit breach. Just meat complaining.

  Beside him, Vos groaned.

  [MEDICAL NOTICE – MILD CONCUSSION // RISK: LOW]

  [LEFT FOREARM – HAIRLINE FRACTURE SUSPECTED]

  Vos rolled off him, helmet scraping the deck, and ended up half-sitting, half-leaning on the wall. His left arm hung closer to his chest; his right hand was still locked on his SMG.

  Vos flexed his fingers experimentally, winced, and let the injured arm stay tucked in.

  “Well,” he rasped. “At least it wasn’t a door this time.”

  Kaden almost laughed. The movement in his chest sent a spear of pain through his rib, and what came out was more like a strangled exhale.

  He pushed himself up onto one knee, then onto his feet, bracing a hand against the wall until the world stopped wobbling.

  They were in a narrow access corridor. The walls were close, lined with junction boxes, smaller panels, tightly packed runs of conduit. The lighting strips along the baseboards glowed a sickly uneven yellow, casting more shadow than illumination.

  Behind them, where they’d fallen from, a solid blast door now sat flush, scorched around its edges, faint wisps of smoke curling from hairline seams. Every few seconds, it pinged as cooling metal settled.

  Static hissed in his ear, louder on the right, barely there on the left.

  “—r…cer—”

  Jax’s voice, shredded by interference. Kaden tapped the side of his helmet out of reflex, knowing it was pointless.

  “Mercer here,” he said. His own voice sounded wrong in his head—too loud on one side, too soft on the other. “With Vos. Minor injuries. We’re—”

  The response came in chopped pieces torn apart by noise.

  “—Theta… gr—…oup—”

  “—di…rect— or…der—”

  “…sta—…a—live—”

  Three words slipped through the static clear enough for his brain to grab:

  Direct.

  Order.

  Alive.

  More noise surged. Tanaka’s voice punched through once, mangled, furious.

  “—fu…ing— Ram…ses—”

  Then nothing but hiss and digital pops.

  [COMMS STATUS – LOCAL JAMMING DETECTED]

  [VOICE LINK – DEGRADED]

  [TEXT LINK – UNRELIABLE]

  On his minimap, Jax, Tanaka, and Navarro’s tags pulsed and flickered, the lines between them and Kaden smearing and vanishing as Aurora struggled to route around the damage and jamming.

  “Get anything useful?” Vos asked.

  Kaden swallowed against a dry throat. “Direct. Order. Alive.”

  Vos huffed a short, humor-tinged breath. “Yeah,” he said. “That sounds exactly like her.”

  Kaden looked back at the blast door. The scorched seam. The lingering heat. The knowledge that three-fifths of Theta-3 were on the other side, moving, hurting, still working the problem.

  “Well,” he said, voice flat but steady, “we now have direct orders to stay alive and regroup.”

  Vos let his helmet rest back against the wall for a second. “You ever notice how the good squad leads somehow sound worse when the comms cut them up?” he said. “That was probably a whole sentence about tactics and risk. We get the part about not dying.”

  Kaden checked his HUD. Concussion warning. Ear damage flagged amber. Hairline fracture noted. AP still at 4/5. Functional. Not comfortable, but functional.

  “Can you walk?” Vos asked.

  Kaden took two careful steps away from the wall. Pain flared with each breath, but his legs held. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m slow, but upright.”

  Vos flexed his left fingers again and hissed. “Forearm’s pissed, not broken-broken,” he said. “I can still shoot. Just don’t ask me to arm-wrestle anyone.”

  Kaden let his hand brush his med harness, reassured by the solid presence of injectors and sealant and tourniquets. The familiar weight helped.

  “Can you clean the signal up?” he asked.

  Vos shook his head, then immediately braced with his good hand as the motion made his vision swim. “Not with what I’ve got,” he said. “Whatever jamming they’ve got in the weapons spine is chewing comms to hell. I could burn my last AP trying to dig a little hole in it, maybe get one clear sentence… and then we’d have nothing left for doors, locks, or tricks.”

  Kaden’s gaze flicked back to the blast door. The instinct to go back, to hammer on it and try anyway, pressed on him like weight.

  He made himself look away.

  “Map?” he asked.

  Vos staggered over to the nearest panel, put his good hand on it, and let Aurora feed him the abstracted mess of Opp glyphs and system hints. Technical Savant did the rest, filling in gaps, turning alien logic into something he could reason about.

  “Okay,” he said after a moment. “We dropped into a side access that runs parallel to a relay cluster. Power and control lines. This path curves around the main weapons spine, not through it.”

  “Relays are still important,” Kaden said.

  “On a ship like this, relays are everything,” Vos said. “They tell the guns when to breathe, how hard, and at what. You mess with the central brain, it knows something’s wrong. You mess with the nerves in the right way, maybe it just thinks it’s having a bad day.”

  He took a couple of limping steps down the passage, SMG in his right hand, muzzle low but ready.

  “AP?” Kaden asked, even though he could see the answer.

  “One,” Vos said. “Rapid Override, Ghost Ping, or Wasp. Pick one golden moment. After that, it’s all wrists and swearing.”

  Kaden checked again: Vos – AP 1/8. Kaden – AP 4/5. Tanaka, Jax, Navarro: no live numbers, just ghosted tags behind too much hull.

  “We don’t use it on comms,” Kaden said. “We’ve got enough. Regroup later. Direct order. Stay alive now.”

  Vos tilted his helmet slightly, considering, then nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “We know the job. Valiant doesn’t eat torpedoes. Everything else is detail work.”

  The side corridor smelled different than the weapon spine hallway. Less sterilized. More raw metal and hot circuitry, a thin tang of coolant under it. The hum here was higher-pitched, layered with little clicks and ticks as relays flipped and systems fought to re-balance after the hit.

  Kaden tagged his injury warnings as acknowledged. Aurora shrank them to the edge of his vision. The pain stayed. The clutter didn’t.

  “What about them?” he asked quietly.

  Vos didn’t pretend not to know who he meant.

  “They’re closer to the main target than we are,” he said. “Tanaka had Anchor up. Navarro was under him. Jax knew something was coming. If they’re down, us pounding on this door won’t fix it. If they’re up, they’re moving. Either way, our contribution is that the torpedo systems forget how to behave.”

  Kaden hated that he was right. He accepted it anyway.

  He gave the blast door one last look, memorizing the scorch patterns, as if that would help.

  Then he turned and followed Vos deeper into the access.

  The corridor bent, then bent again. At one point, a fat coolant pipe forced them to turn sideways to slip past, armor scraping insulated metal. The hum of power was louder here, almost a buzz in his bones.

  Ten meters. Fifteen.

  “Feels like a good place to die,” Vos said conversationally after squeezing around a particularly ugly bundle of cabling.

  “Let’s not,” Kaden said.

  Vos gave a dry little laugh. “Look at you,” he said. “Already following orders.”