Kaden took another slow breath and let it out through his nose. His lungs burned a little. His tongue tasted like metal and recycled air and the ghost of the blood he’d been breathing around.

  On the far side of the room, Jax stood near a jagged gap in a console bank, helmet tilted slightly, like she was listening to someone only she could hear. Vos and Navarro watched doors. Tanaka propped himself up with his ruined shield like a crutch and rolled his injured leg carefully, testing what it would take.

  “Break time is over, Sergeant,” Navarro said quietly. “Feels like it, anyway.”

  “Almost,” Jax said.

  Her voice sounded a little flatter than normal, like she was holding something else in check.

  Kaden swallowed. His hand pulsed in time with his heartbeat, a dull hammer behind the sealant. His HUD kept offering status updates he didn’t need.

  [HAND TRAUMA – STABLE]

  [PAIN LEVEL – MODERATE–HIGH]

  [AP – MERCER: 2/5]

  He blinked the overlay away and took stock like she’d told them.

  SMG: mag seated, about half left. Two full mags and one partial on his harness. Sidearm in its holster. Med block lighter than he liked: tourniquets down, sealant foam lower. Painkillers still decent. One stim.

  Armor: bruised ribs under the plates, but nothing had punched through. He ran his right hand along his chestplate, looking for cracks or obvious spall and feeling nothing that made his gut clench.

  Across the room, Vos pushed his helmet back against a patch of intact wall for a second, eyes closed. He did a fast mag check one-handed, slapped it back in, then shifted his stance so he could get the SMG up quickly if he needed it. The sling across his chest was stained, his left arm hanging lazy and tight against his body.

  [AP – VOS: 0/8]

  Aurora’s little note for Vos sat in the corner of Kaden’s HUD like a warning label.

  Tanaka grunted and managed to get his full weight onto both legs for a heartbeat. His shield wobbled, then steadied as he held it in front of him again.

  “How’s the leg?” Kaden asked.

  “Feels like someone put a furnace in my thigh,” Tanaka said. “But I can move.”

  “Movement is the goal,” Kaden said. “Trying to sprint is how you end up on my floor again.”

  “Didn’t plan on it,” Tanaka said. “Pretty sure the floor’s had enough of me for today.”

  Jax lifted a hand, and the half-conversations died. Her helmet turned toward the center of the room.

  Kaden didn’t hear anything new at first. Just the same distant gunfire, the same low rumble of a ship under assault.

  Then his comms clicked, and Okafor’s voice cut through, cleaner than it had been since the split.

  “Theta-3, this is Okafor,” he said. “Status report.”

  Jax straightened a fraction, shoulders squaring as she stepped into clearer view of the room as if that mattered. “Theta-3 in control of Opp weapons sub-control node,” she said. “Local defenders neutralized. Squad rejoined. One serious wound, Tanaka, leg and hip, but he’s mobile. Mercer and Vos both injured but combat-capable. Opp torpedo sub-systems appear heavily damaged.”

  “Copy,” Okafor said. There was a pause, filled with the distant cough of the ship’s own guns through the hull. “Be advised, Shenzhou and Harrow’s Wake confirm significant disruption to Opp torpedo launch patterns. Your mess down there is showing up as bad math on their side.”

  Kaden’s HUD flashed a small fleet-level overlay.

  [OPP PLASMA TORPEDO CAPABILITY – FUNCTION: DEGRADED (SEVERE)]

  [REMOTE TARGETING – PARTIAL]

  [FIRING CYCLES – UNSAFE]

  Gaunt’s voice came on a split-second later, keyed to the task force.

  “Task Force Harrow to all elements,” he said. “We have confirmation: Opp torpedo capability is badly compromised. They can still fire, but their aim is drunk and timings are off. That is Theta’s work. Good hunting.”

  The line dropped back to Okafor.

  “Primary firing control for those torpedoes is still up,” the commander said. “Opp are trying to route around the damage. Theta-2 and Theta-1 are tied up in their own sections. Theta-4 is occupied. Theta-5 is already deep. That leaves you.”

  Jax’s helmet dipped once. “What’s the path?” she asked.

  “Forward and slightly ventral from your position,” Okafor said. “We’re pushing you a nav marker, but you know the caveats. Opp architecture is not standardized. Expect more lockdowns and structural damage. Shenzhou’s best guess puts primary firing control within two hundred meters of your current location, three bulkheads between you and it.”

  A waypoint pinged at the top of Kaden’s HUD, a faint orange arrow with a distance counter and a little warning icon appended.

  [ROUTE – ESTIMATED]

  [JAMMING / LOCAL ERROR: HIGH]

  “This ship dies whether we touch that room or not?” Jax asked.

  “Yes,” Okafor said. “Valiant and escorts are tearing it apart. But the longer those torps can throw any kind of punch, the more we risk bad luck. One clean hit in the wrong place, we’re having a very different conversation.”

  Kaden pictured it. An Opp torpedo getting a lucky line on Valiant’s flank. A breach. Atmosphere venting crew out into the void. Theta-3’s bunk bay turned into a twisted, open cavity.

  He swallowed.

  “Understood,” Jax said. “Theta-3 will advance to primary firing control and neutralize it.”

  “Good hunting,” Okafor said. The line clicked off.

  For a second, the only sound inside the room was their breathing and the faint crackle of a dying console.

  Jax turned back to them.

  “There’s the good news,” she said. “We’ve already made these torpedoes unreliable. The more they try to use them, the more their own ship hates them. Now the bad: primary firing control is still alive. They’re trying to patch around what we broke and salvage whatever damage they can do before this hull stops existing.”

  She gestured vaguely at the deck under them.

  “We can let them try,” she said. “Hope the guns stay drunk and unlucky. Or we can go make sure they stay that way by ripping the last piece out.”

  “Rhetorical question?” Vos asked.

  “Completely,” Jax said.

  Tanaka shifted his weight and grunted. “If those guns get even one hit they like,” he said, “some poor bastards die because we were tired.”

  Kaden felt that settle in his gut like another weight added to the stack.

  He thought of Gaunt’s address back on the Valiant. The evaluation. The highlight reel. All the simulations built to teach them what happened when someone cut corners.

  He also thought of how his fingers weren’t there when he flexed his left hand. Of how his vision fuzzed at the edges if he blinked too slowly.

  Navarro checked her mag, slammed it home, and blew out a breath. “You’re not selling me on sitting here,” she said. “Tell me where to point the rifle.”

  Jax’s helmet nodded once. “All right,” she said. “Status check, then we move.”

  She pointed.

  “Tanaka,” she said. “Leg?”

  “Functional enough,” Tanaka said. “You get me there, I’ll hold a doorway.”

  “Good,” Jax said. “You’re still point with what’s left of the shield. Don’t sprint. Don’t hero-run anything. You go down in front, we all trip over you and die tired and annoyed.”

  “Wouldn’t want that,” Tanaka said.

  “Navarro,” Jax said. “Ammo?”

  “Two mags full, one half,” Navarro said. “Plus pistol. Enough if I stop missing.”

  “You haven’t been missing,” Jax said. “Keep not missing.”

  She shifted to Vos.

  “Vos,” she said. “AP is nothing. I know that already. Anything you can still do to make doors and cameras hate our enemies and not us?”

  Vos rolled his good shoulder. “No more Wasp,” he said. “No more clean hacks. But I can still pull fuses, cut power lines, shut doors manually, and shoot the same panels I’d normally convince to behave. Just with bullets instead of software.”

  “Good,” Jax said. “That still counts.”

  Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  Her helmet turned toward Kaden.

  “Medic,” she said. “Two fingers down. How’s the rest of you?”

  Kaden glanced briefly at his HUD, more habit than need.

  [PHY: 6]

  [AGI: 4]

  [COG: 7]

  [RES: 6]

  [AP – MERCER: 2/5]

  Fatigue wasn’t a stat, but it might as well have been. It hummed in his muscles.

  “Functional,” he said. “Hand hurts like hell, but I can still shoot, still work. Two AP left.”

  “You pass out, we’re screwed,” Jax said. “Concussion?”

  “Head’s not swimming unless I stop moving,” he said. “So I’m not going to stop moving.”

  “Good plan,” she said. “Stick to it.”

  She shifted her weight, bringing them all into her field of view.

  “Here’s what we’re doing,” she said. “Tanaka leads, shield up, but he’s not sprinting. Navarro second, watching near flanks and anything that pops in front. Mercer just behind Navarro. If someone goes down, you’re there. I’ll float between front and middle where I can see enough to call shifts. Vos, you’re rear guard and last set of eyes on anything that looks like a control panel waiting to bite us. We move tight, we move quiet, and until I say otherwise we treat every intersection like it’s trying to kill us.”

  No one argued.

  “You all feel how empty you are?” Jax asked. “AP, ammo, energy. That’s good. Remember it. That’s what a real op feels like. The sims don’t push you this far.”

  Kaden thought briefly of Corin’s training. Of the way the academy exercise had gone from practice to horror in seconds. Of how he’d promised himself he would never freeze like that again.

  He didn’t feel frozen now. He felt like a cable pulled almost to snapping.

  “Any questions?” Jax asked.

  Nobody had any.

  “Then we move,” she said. “Tanaka, take us out. Marker’s on your HUD. I’ll correct if it changes or if Shenzhou finds out they lied to us.”

  Tanaka tested his leg once more, then brought the shield up. The top edge had a jagged bite out of it where the grenade had caught it, but there was enough plate left to hide behind. He limped toward the main door, using the shield not just as cover but as a balance point.

  Navarro fell in behind him, rifle up and steady.

  Kaden took his place next, feeling the familiar weight of the SMG settle. He adjusted his sling so his left hand could float near the foregrip without actually taking weight. If he had to, he could brace with it for a shot or a tourniquet, but every time he closed those fingers even a little, his vision tightened at the edges.

  Jax took the center, close enough to tap shoulders, far enough back to see lines and angles.

  Vos drifted to the rear, muzzle toward the room’s open wounds, eyes flicking between doors and any panel that still had lights on it. Even without Wasp and Rapid Override, Aurora highlighted small nodes when he looked their way, as if habit alone was enough to make the system pay attention.

  Kaden gave weapons sub-control one last glance before they stepped out.

  Opp bodies lay where they’d fallen, twisted and inert. Blood had pooled under some, seeped into cracks of the deck under others. The consoles they’d fought over flickered in dying patterns. A few still showed the ghost image of targeting data, half-rendered and meaningless now that Vos had smashed their logic apart.

  For a second, he imagined not coming back through this room. Imagined Valiant’s guns finally tearing the whole section open and venting this space into raw vacuum. Pieces of Opp machinery and Opp dead tumbling silently away.

  Better them than us, a part of him thought. Another part added, quietly, but they were still people.

  He turned away and followed.

  The door out of the room had been forced open earlier. Its locking mechanism was bent and scorched. Tanaka eased through first, shield forward, sweeping the muzzle of his shotgun down the corridor. Navarro ghosted past his elbow a half-step, covering the opposite lane.

  Kaden’s HUD overlaid the faint orange marker toward primary firing control. It was less a straight arrow and more a restless suggestion, shifting a few degrees left or right as Aurora and Shenzhou argued about what counted as a path and what counted as “solid wall we don’t have data behind.”

  The corridor outside showed more of the ship’s wounds.

  Sections of the ceiling had bowed inward. A support strut in one spot had buckled, forcing them to duck under it one at a time. Burn marks streaked the walls. The air smelled thicker, edged with coolant and the sour note of failing ventilation.

  “Watch your footing,” Jax said quietly. “Last thing we need is someone rolling an ankle on scrap and having to explain that to medbay.”

  They moved at a slogging, careful pace. Fast enough not to linger in one place, slow enough that Tanaka didn’t push his patched leg into something it couldn’t sustain.

  Kaden kept his eyes moving. Corners, doors, vents. Places someone could crouch or a drone could wait. He’d spent weeks in sims learning Opp interior layouts and still felt like every turn was new and slightly wrong.

  They passed a side corridor where a bulkhead had collapsed completely, blocking the passage with twisted metal and snapped conduits. Kaden glanced down it, then quickly away.

  His HUD showed their nav marker shifting, rerouting them around the blockage.

  “Shenzhou’s probably cursing that cave-in,” Vos muttered from the rear. “Bet they thought that was a clean path five seconds ago.”

  “Less cursing,” Jax said. “More walking.”

  Around the next bend, they stepped over the first dead Hegemony marine Kaden had seen on this ship.

  The body lay half in and half out of a doorway, rifle still clutched in both hands. Armor tags floated above the chestplate.

  [THETA-2 // H. DRAKE – STATUS: KIA]

  A blackened hole had been punched through one side of the helmet. The visor was spiderwebbed inward.

  Kaden didn’t let himself look long. He checked for any sign of movement, any twitch that might mean “not as dead as Aurora thinks,” then forced his eyes forward again.

  Navarro’s jaw clenched as she stepped over the body. Tanaka’s shield dipped a fraction, then came back up.

  Jax didn’t comment.

  They moved on.

  A little further down, the ship shook more violently. The deck tilted under Kaden’s boots, enough that he had to throw a hand against the wall to stay upright. A deep, grinding roar reached them through the hull, like distant thunder trapped inside metal.

  “Someone just ate something big,” Vos said.

  “Hope it wasn’t us,” Navarro said.

  Kaden’s HUD flicked an update he didn’t fully understand, something about shield harmonics and impact vector. He dismissed it.

  They reached another intersection. The marker wanted them left. The corridor to the left was darker, emergency strips dimmer, smoke hanging a little lower in the air. The right-hand path was brighter, but Aurora glitched when he glanced that way.

  [PATH DATA – CORRUPTED]

  “Left,” Jax said. “Tanaka, keep the shield high. Navarro, check the floor for trip surprises.”

  “On it,” Navarro said.

  She dipped her muzzle, sweeping the deck ahead for small devices, mines, glint of metal that wasn’t supposed to be there. So far, Opp defense on this ship had been mostly bodies and guns, not clever toys, but it would be stupid to assume that stayed true.

  Kaden’s heartbeat felt loud in his ears. His AP counter, hovering at the edge of his vision, felt like a countdown clock.

  Two stabs left, he thought. One if he needed to keep someone alive badly enough to burn R1 and half his brain in the process.

  He still had the stim. That was its own problem. Using it would spike his stats, clear the fuzz, and then drop him harder than he wanted to think about. That was a future-Kaden problem. Present Kaden needed to not trip over wreckage.

  “Movement up ahead,” Navarros said suddenly.

  Kaden snapped back to the corridor. About fifteen meters ahead, the passage widened slightly around a thicker support pillar. Past it, a junction blurred into deeper shadow.

  For half a second, he thought he saw a figure slip across the gap.

  “Opp?” Tanaka asked.

  “Could be,” Navarro said. “Could be a marine. Could be a sensor ghost. Light’s bad.”

  Jax’s voice stayed calm. “No skill bursts,” she said. “We don’t have the AP to burn on preemptive tricks. Treat it like a contact until it proves otherwise. Tanaka, steady push, shield up. Navarro, if it moves and points something at us, you kill it. Mercer, be ready to dive forward or backward. Vos, if you see anything that looks like a camera pitch or door sensor, you shoot it before it tells the ship we’re coming.”

  “Copy,” Vos said.

  They advanced.

  The figure didn’t reappear. When they reached the wider section, Kaden realized what he’d seen.

  Shadows thrown by a half-hanging conduit panel swung across the wall at just the right height and angle to mimic a person’s upper body.

  His heart was still pounding.

  “False alarm,” Navarro said quietly.

  “Still good practice,” Jax replied. “You jump at the fake ones, you live longer when the real ones show up.”

  They pressed on.

  The further they went, the more the ship’s design signaled they were nearing something important. Bulkheads thickened. The density of cabling along the walls increased. Aurora highlighted more glyph plates with notation tags like:

  [WEAPON CONDUIT]

  [HIGH-ENERGY TRANSFER]

  [RESTRICTED ACCESS]

  The air felt hotter. Not enough to be dangerous, but enough that sweat trickled down Kaden’s back under the armor. His undersuit stuck to his skin. His hand throbbed in time with his steps.

  He tried not to think about corpses, or Song, or anything that lived beyond the next door.

  “Marker says we’re close,” Jax said quietly. “Primary firing control should be within one or two bulkheads. Expect heavier resistance. This is where they care the most.”

  “Feels like it,” Tanaka grunted. “Ship’s humming different.”

  The deck under Kaden’s boots did feel like it carried more vibration. Not from impacts this time, but from power. Like a barely-audible thrum, deeper than the usual systems noise. Torpedo charge lines. Capacitors cycling. Whatever was left of them.

  Navarro swallowed. Kaden could hear it over comms. “You think they’re still trying to feed power to torps?” she asked.

  “I think they’ll keep trying until they can’t,” Jax said. “Our job is to get them to ‘can’t.’”

  “Hopefully before they get lucky,” Vos muttered.

  They rounded another bend, and the corridor ended at a bulkhead door that was thicker than the others they’d seen. The glyphs around the frame were more numerous and more emphatic. Aurora tagged the cluster with a simple composite.

  [PRIMARY WEAPON CONTROL – LOCAL ACCESS]

  “Well,” Vos said. “At least the signs are honest.”

  The door status light pulsed amber. Sealed, but not fused. Not dead.

  Jax held up a fist. The squad halted.

  “This is it,” she said. “We breach this, we’re in the perimeter of primary firing control. Opp will be dug in. They know if they lose this room, whatever’s left of their torps goes away or starts killing the wrong ships.”

  She turned slightly, taking them in one by one.

  “AP state?” she asked.

  “Two,” Kaden said.

  “Two,” Jax echoed. “Tanaka?”

  “One,” Tanaka said. “Saving it for when you shout at me.”

  “Do that,” Jax said. “Navarro?”

  “One, Sergeant,” Navarro said. “Still shooting straight, though.”

  Vos didn’t wait to be called. “Zero,” he said. “I’m a very expensive rifle right now.”

  “Then that’s what you are,” Jax said. “Good thing you’re decent with it.”

  She stepped closer to the door, keeping herself off to the side in case someone on the other side decided to put a round through it. She touched her glove to the frame, just for a second, like she was feeling its heartbeat.

  “Here’s the last part of this,” she said. “We’re exhausted. We’re low on AP. We’re scraped, concussed, and bleeding. So is pretty much everyone else on this ship who’s still breathing. That includes the people on the other side of this door.”

  Kaden thought of the Opp he and Vos had fought in the crawlspace. How tired they’d looked. How frantic. Not monsters. Just people in the wrong corridor.

  “All that matters,” Jax said, “is who holds that room when the lights finally go out. We get in there, we break whatever is still telling those torps how to fly, and then we walk out. Or crawl out. Or get carried. But we leave that place in ruins.”

  She looked at Tanaka.

  “Can you get us through this without your leg giving out?” she asked.

  Tanaka rolled his shoulders, then nodded once. “If it does, I’ll fall forward,” he said. “Make a nice ramp for you all.”

  “Considerate,” Jax said. “All right. On my mark, we stack. We don’t use skills unless I call for them; we can’t afford to spray AP and hope. We watch our lanes. And we remember that nobody is coming to pull us out if we get cute and lose.”

  Nobody answered. They didn’t need to.

  Kaden felt the tight curl of fear in his gut. Not the cold spike from the first live rounds back at the breach, not the suffocating terror from the crawlspace. This was something heavier. Tired fear. The kind that knew exactly how many ways the next room could go wrong.

  He also felt something else.

  Theta-3 had been five people on a chart when he’d stepped aboard Valiant. Now it was this: a limping heavy using his shield as a cane, a rifleman with shaking hands who held the line anyway, a tech specialist with no AP left who still managed to open doors and pick his targets, a sergeant running on stubbornness and experience, and a medic with two missing fingers and far too much blood on his armor.

  Running on fumes. Still moving.

  “Stack up,” Jax said.

  Tanaka moved to the door, shield forward. Navarro slid in behind his right shoulder, rifle up. Kaden took position behind her, close enough that he could feel the faint vibrations of her breath through his armor. Jax set herself behind him, one hand resting lightly on his shoulder. Vos took rear, SMG angled to cover the corridor behind them.

  Kaden’s HUD pinged a faint warning about heart rate. He ignored it.

  “On breach,” Jax said quietly, “we go in clean. No yelling. No hero shit. Shoot who needs shooting. Move who needs moving. And if I go down, you follow the last order I gave you and finish the job anyway.”

  Kaden nodded, even though she couldn’t see it.

  “Ready,” Tanaka said.

  “Ready,” Navarro echoed.

  “Ready,” Kaden said.

  “Ready,” Vos added.

  Jax’s hand tightened on Kaden’s shoulder for a second, just enough that he could feel human pressure through layers of armor.

  “Theta-3,” she said. “Let’s go break their last good toy.”

  She pulled her hand away.

  The light beside the door remained stubbornly amber.

  For now.