When the pod hit Valiant’s hangar cradle, Kaden barely felt it.

  Adrenaline had carried him all the way down. The moment the clamps grabbed and the hatch warnings started to chirp, his body did the math and decided it was finished. The world narrowed to a tunnel with Jax’s voice at the far end before everything went dark under the slide of something cold from a med tech’s injector.

  He came back to bright light and the clean bite of antiseptic.

  For a second he didn’t know where he was. White, curved ceiling panels. The soft, steady hum of the Valiant running at something close to normal instead of battle-station chaos. No helmet. No armor. Just a thin medbay sheet over his chest and air on skin that had been under plates for too long.

  He tried to flex his fingers.

  His right hand responded normally: five familiar movements, knuckles sore, a faint tug where gloves had rubbed them raw.

  His left hand felt wrong.

  Kaden blinked and lifted it.

  Two of the fingers weren’t his.

  The index and middle were still flesh, faint pink staining from scrubbed-in blood. The ring and pinky were metal: short, matte segments articulated with narrow joints that flexed smoothly when he moved on instinct. Slim interface pads traced along the back of his hand, disappearing under the skin where prosthetic met bone and nerve.

  Aurora tagged it on his HUD.

  [PROSTHETIC INTEGRATION – LEFT HAND]

  [RING / LITTLE – CYBERNETIC]

  [MOTOR LINK – ONLINE]

  [FINE CONTROL – CALIBRATION: 78%]

  He curled the fingers slowly. The motion was too smooth, too light. No tendon pull, no sense of weight—just movement.

  He did it again, just to prove to himself it was real.

  “Wild, isn’t it?”

  The voice came from the next bed.

  Kaden turned his head.

  Tanaka lay half propped up, his left leg cradled in a suspension rig that held hip and thigh at a fixed angle. His bare arms were a map of thick muscle and ugly bruises in yellow and purple. His scalp was smooth and gleaming under the medbay lights; his beard was short and dark, kept tight even with adhesive residue still clinging at the edges.

  He gave Kaden a tired grin.

  “First time you wake up and there’s more machine than you remember,” Tanaka said. “Takes a second.”

  Kaden swallowed. His throat felt like sandpaper.

  “Hurts less than losing them,” he said. His voice sounded rough and a little too thin.

  “That’s the drugs talking,” Tanaka said. “Give it a day. Then you get the joy of rehab.”

  Kaden flexed again. The cyber fingers tracked without lag. Aurora nudged the calibration up another point.

  He forced his focus outward.

  Medbay was big.

  The ceiling arched high, lights diffused so they didn’t stab straight into healing eyes. Two long rows of beds stretched down the space with curtain tracks between them that were mostly pushed aside. Articulated arms held monitors and fluid bags, Aurora overlays floating in Kaden’s vision over Hegemony hardware.

  By his rough count, the place could handle fifty patients without feeling crammed.

  Most of the beds were full.

  Theta tags floated above a lot of them.

  Further down, tags shifted into line company designations and shipboard security teams: the marines who followed in the shock squads’ wake to hold corridors, finish sweeps, pull bodies out. Their armor sat in organized piles along one bulkhead: scorched, pitted, edges bubbled where heat had tried to eat through. Stenciled names and unit marks glared through the damage.

  Some of the marines were awake, trailed lines and tired jokes behind them as they talked. Others lay still with eyes closed while monitors beeped steady rhythms overhead. The air smelled like antiseptic, recycled oxygen, sweat, and faintly of burned plating that hadn’t finished off-gassing from armor.

  Two beds down from Tanaka, Kaden saw a familiar tag.

  [THETA-2 // P. PERKINS – STABLE]

  The first marine he’d stabilized on the Opp ship. Their midsection was wrapped heavy under the sheet, lines running into both arms and a drain snaking under the covers. Their face was pale, cheeks hollowed, but their eyes were open. When they saw Kaden looking, they raised one hand and wobbled it in a half-wave.

  Kaden lifted his left hand and curled the metal fingers in answer.

  Perkins squinted, then snorted weakly. He could almost hear the thought: show-off.

  Across the aisle, Havel lay propped up, jaw clenched as if they were holding their teeth together by force. Most of their lower body disappeared into braces and support frames. The monitor over their head pulsed calm green with occasional yellow flickers when pain spiked.

  Havel noticed him and tapped two fingers clumsily against their temple.

  “Hey, Doc,” someone said. “You planning on inventorying the whole bay, or you gonna say hi?”

  Kaden turned his head the other way.

  Vos sprawled in the bed to his right, hair matted around a shaved strip and neatly taped bandage along his hairline. One eye was blooming into an impressive purple bruise. His injured arm was immobilized in a sling rig; Aurora projected a transparent overlay of bone and microfracture patterns when Kaden’s gaze lingered.

  Navarro perched sideways on the far edge of Vos’ mattress, one leg folded under her, the other stretched out with her thigh wrapped where a round had grazed her. She’d swiped a medbay blanket and draped it around her shoulders. Damp hair stuck to her forehead and neck in uneven strands.

  Further down, Jax sat upright in her bed despite the broad band of pressure dressings across her ribs and the IV line in her arm. Her hair was pulled back in a rough knot. Her skin was a shade too pale, a sheen of exhaustion around her eyes. Commander Okafor stood at the foot of her bed, slate in hand, uniform rumpled and collar open like he hadn’t had time to pretend he wasn’t wrecked.

  Okafor nodded at something Jax said. His gaze flicked down the row and met Kaden’s for a moment. He gave the smallest incline of his chin, then went back to the slate.

  “Welcome back to the world of the partially intact,” Vos said. “How you feeling?”

  “Like I got dragged through an Opp weapons room,” Kaden said.

  “Accurate,” Vos said. “I recommend not doing it twice.”

  He shifted, winced as his shoulder pulled against the sling.

  “You missed the fun part,” Vos added. “The ‘we’re going to knock you out now before you decorate the deck’ bit.”

  “I remember enough,” Kaden said.

  Navarro leaned forward until he could see her past Vos.

  “Show us,” she said.

  Kaden blinked. “What?”

  “The hand,” Navarro said. “Come on. We heard. We want to see what top-tier Hegemony healthcare looks like.”

  “Don’t worry,” Vos said. “We checked. They didn’t cheap out. You got the good fingers. Military-grade. Probably even match the armor when they’re done.”

  Tanaka snorted under his breath.

  “Pretty sure you’re not supposed to lose parts on your first op,” he said. “You’re making the rest of us look lazy, Mercer.”

  Kaden lifted his left hand, palm out.

  The metal segments caught the overhead light in a dull, functional way. He spread the fingers, curled them into a fist, then opened them again one at a time.

  The cyber digits moved as easily as the flesh ones.

  Navarro let out a low whistle.

  “Damn,” she said. “They did nice work.”

  “Bet it pinches like hell when the nerves misfire,” Vos said. “You’ll be dropping cups and swearing for weeks.”

  “Looking forward to it already,” Kaden said.

  From the next row over, a voice chimed in.

  “Lost three on my second tour,” a Theta-4 marine called. “Took me a month to stop flinching every time I grabbed something. You’ll swear a lot. Then it gets boring again.”

  “See?” Vos said. “Community wisdom. Very supportive environment.”

  Kaden let his hand fall back to the bed.

  “How bad?” he asked.

  Navarro tugged the blanket a little closer around herself.

  “Depends what you call bad,” she said.

  “How many of us came back in one piece,” Kaden said.

  Tanaka’s beard twitched in something that wasn’t quite a smile.

  “Shock squads got chewed,” he said. “Line and cleanup got banged up holding what we cracked open. We took the first punches.”

  Now that Kaden’s head was clearer, the map of the room made more sense.

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  Theta-1’s cluster: a marine with half his head wrapped, another with chest tubes and a mask, one asleep with both arms in light exosplints. Theta-2’s: a traction rig, Havel’s mess of braces, Perkin’s bandaged midsection. Theta-4’s corner looked like a fragmentation advertisement—shrapnel scars, limb braces, scorch marks along exposed skin.

  Theta-5 looked worst.

  Three occupied beds. One marine lay flat with a ventilator doing their breathing, chest rising and falling in machine-timed lifts. Another sat half upright but dazed, jaw wired, one arm in a sling and bruises blooming across their face. The third was braced at neck and shoulders, face mostly hidden behind bandages, only a strip of swollen eyelid visible.

  Two gaps where beds should have been, clear tape marks on the floor where equipment had stood and then gone elsewhere.

  Kaden scanned for a particular tag.

  No Song.

  “They’re still cycling people between here and surgery,” Tanaka said quietly. “Imaging, recovery. Don’t start counting ghosts just because you don’t see him.”

  Kaden nodded once. The hollow feeling in his gut didn’t move.

  Vos shifted on his pillow, easing himself a little higher.

  “So,” he said. “Who’s telling stories? We’ve got a captive audience.”

  Kaden realized he was right. A handful of marines in nearby beds had gone quiet, watching. A med tech leaned against a bulkhead with a cup in his hand, eyes tracking between them and his slate.

  Navarro rolled her eyes.

  “You started it with the engine room line,” she said. “You start.”

  Vos cleared his throat and tipped his head toward Kaden.

  “All right,” he said. “Short version: Mercer and I learn what happens when a ship decides you should be in two different corridors.”

  His voice had that dry cadence he used when he was balancing around something ugly.

  “We hit that charge in the corridor,” he said. “Opp had wired the junction. Doors slam, bulkheads shift, blast tries to turn us into paste. When everything stops moving, it’s me, Mercer, and a whole lot of messed-up hallway on one side, and Jax, Tanaka, and Navarro on the other. Comms sound like someone dropped them in a blender. We get… what, four words?”

  “‘Group. Direct. Order. Alive,’” Kaden said.

  “Yeah,” Vos said. “So we do what the nice sergeant says. Group. Two of us. One direction: forward.”

  He sketched it in broad strokes. The jammed hatches. The detour into maintenance. The weird hitch in gravity near the ship’s spinal conduit.

  He didn’t avoid the vent fight.

  “We hit a maintenance choke,” he said. “Two Opp techs between us and a control cluster. Vent’s too tight to shoot without turning it into a mutual suicide pact. So we get educational.”

  “Educational,” someone repeated from Theta-1’s corner, half amused, half horrified.

  “Turns out techs bleed like everyone else,” Vos said. “We also learn Mercer’s off hand and Opp knives don’t get along. Knife took a souvenir.”

  He nodded at Kaden’s left hand.

  Kaden flexed the cyber fingers again, more out of reflex now than to make a point.

  “Got sloppy,” he said. “Paid for it.”

  “You didn’t die,” Vos said. “That’s the important bit.”

  A murmur rippled through the listening marines. Sympathy, a bit of grim respect. Anyone who’d ever fumbled under fire recognized the difference.

  “Anyway,” Vos went on. “We win the worst wrestling match of my life, Mercer glues himself together enough to keep moving, we find a relay room, make a very important piece of hardware very sad, and by the time we’re done, the torps are questioning their career choices.”

  “Shenzhou was very loud about that,” Tanaka said. “You two made the sensor boys happy.”

  “We aim to please,” Vos said. “Eventually we punch our way back into the main party through a balcony and make Jax’s life marginally easier. Tanaka throws himself between a grenade and the squad, Navarro does something stupid and smart with a pistol, and here we are.”

  “Stupid?” Navarro said. “Really?”

  “You were out of rifle ammo,” Vos said mildly. “It still counts.”

  Navarro snorted.

  A Theta-2 marine lifted a hand. “How are you telling that like it was a training sim?”

  “Practice,” Vos said. “If you don’t laugh at it, you either break or turn into one of those guys who writes manifestos. I like me better this way.”

  Navarro shifted, trying to get comfortable, and hissed as her thigh protested.

  “He’s leaving out that we were having a worse time,” she said. “No vents. No relay. Just a lot of Opp who really didn’t want to let us near their guns.”

  Kaden looked at her. “Your side wasn’t exactly quiet.”

  She shrugged under the blanket.

  “Blast hits, doors drop,” Navarro said. “Next thing I know, my ears are busted, Tanaka’s on top of me with the shield, and Jax is yelling for a status check like the whole world isn’t ringing.”

  She ran it through from there. The push toward the weapons section. The way Jax had ridden the edge of her own nerves, pushing them without tipping over. The corridor where Opp defenders had decided to make a stand. The grenade.

  She jerked her chin toward Tanaka’s rigged leg.

  “That should’ve taken Jax,” she said. “He shoved her out of the way and ate it instead.”

  Several heads turned toward Tanaka.

  He scratched at his short beard with the hand that wasn’t full of IV lines.

  “Wasn’t thinking,” he said. “You just move.”

  “That’s the point,” Navarro said. “You didn’t stop to calculate. You just did it.”

  Jax’s voice drifted down the row, dry.

  “And that’s exactly how it’s going in the report,” she said. “If you complain, I’ll make it sound more heroic.”

  Tanaka groaned quietly. “Please don’t. I already get stared at.”

  “You’re in traction because you decided I’d look better without shrapnel,” Jax said. “They can stare all they like.”

  She shifted slightly, careful with the bandages, and turned her attention fully toward Theta-3’s beds and the little knot of listeners around them.

  “Theta-3,” she said. “You did good work. All of you.”

  Coming from her, even that short sentence carried weight.

  “Navarro kept her lanes clear,” she went on. “Vos made sure a set of guns that could’ve gutted this task force stayed quiet. Tanaka did what heavies are supposed to do and put himself between fire and the rest of us. Mercer…”

  She met his eyes.

  “…Mercer did exactly what a shock medic is supposed to do,” she said. “On deck and in here. Under fire, out of AP, barely upright, and people he touched are in beds instead of on a wall.”

  There was a ripple of soft sound—acknowledgment, a little humor at the phrasing.

  Perkins shifted, raising his hand again.

  “Gotta agree with the sergeant,” he said, voice shaky but audible. “Would’ve bled out in that corridor if you hadn’t sat on my guts, Mercer. Med tech said so.”

  “Sat is a strong word,” Kaden said.

  “You were in there,” he said. “Whatever you call it, it worked.”

  Okafor cleared his throat, bringing some attention back his way.

  “Aurora noticed,” he said.

  Every marine in earshot went just a little still. Kaden felt himself automatically flick his focus inward.

  His HUD chimed.

  [AURORA – POST-ENGAGEMENT REVIEW]

  [SUBJECT: K. MERCER]

  [TIER 1 – LEVEL 3 – COMBAT MEDIC (SHOCK OUTFIT)]

  The level tag ticked up by one. A brief overlay of his stats followed.

  PHY: 6 → 6

  AGI: 4 → 5

  COG: 7 → 7

  RES: 6 → 7

  AP: 5 → 6

  [FIELD STABILIZE – PROGRESSION: COMPLETE]

  [NEW SKILL UNLOCKED: FIELD MENDER (R1)]

  └ Passive aura: slight boost to clotting and natural recovery for nearby allies. Does not replace active treatment. Can be activated for 1AP to slightly increase effect.

  A thin, faint ring blossomed around his bed in his vision, just at the edge of perception—Aurora’s way of showing Field Mender’s radius if he wanted to see it. Petrov and Havel were both inside the circle.

  As he watched, Petrov’s vitals nudged upward a notch. Nothing dramatic. Just a little more stable than a second before.

  It should have felt like a win.

  It mostly felt like a weight settling behind his sternum.

  Navarro let out a short laugh.

  “Of course,” she said. “It waits until I’m stuck in a bed to say anything.”

  Her expression went distant as she checked her HUD.

  “You get something?” Vos asked.

  “Yeah,” Navarro said slowly. “Controlled Burst is capped. And… Fire Discipline.”

  She squinted and read.

  “Aurora says I ‘exhibited consistent lane judgment and target prioritization under fire,’” she said. “Pretty sure that’s ‘you didn’t panic-shoot’ in fancy.”

  “Checks,” Tanaka said. “You made my life easier.”

  “There’s also a trait,” Navarro added. “Quickdraw. Faster swap to sidearm.”

  She mimed dropping a rifle and going for a hip holster.

  “Guess it liked me not standing there with an empty mag when that last Opp popped up,” she said.

  “I liked it too,” Jax said. “Keep doing that.”

  Kaden’s HUD blinked again as squad data bled over, Aurora flagging Theta-3 as a unit.

  [T. NAVARRO – TIER 1 / LEVEL 3 – RIFLEMAN (SHOCK OUTFIT)]

  PHY: 7 → 7

  AGI: 6 → 8

  COG: 5 → 5

  RES: 5 → 6

  AP: 5 → 5

  TRAITS: QUICKDRAW

  SKILLS: CONTROLLED BURST, FIRE DISCIPLINE

  Vos’ notification triggered next. He squinted, then let his head tip back, mouth quirking.

  “Oh, that’s dirty,” he said.

  “What now?” Navarro asked.

  “Wasp’s happy,” Vos said. “Rapid Override ticked up. And Aurora’s decided I should be even more annoying.”

  He threw the update into squad-share. Kaden’s HUD flashed.

  [E. VOS – TIER 1 / LEVEL 6 – TECH SPECIALIST (SHOCK OUTFIT)]

  PHY: 4 → 4

  AGI: 5 → 5

  COG: 9 → 10

  RES: 6 → 6

  AP: 8 → 9

  [RAPID OVERRIDE – PROGRESSION: IMPROVED RESPONSE]

  [NEW SKILL UNLOCKED: HORNET DRONE (R1)]

  └ Weaponized micro-drone. Light-caliber bursts. Limited ammo. Short-duration suppression / covering fire.

  “A gun drone,” someone muttered from a Theta-1 bed. “Of course the tech gets a gun drone.”

  “Light gun,” Vos said. “Short leash, not a lot of shots. It’s not a magic turret. Just another way to make someone’s life worse at the wrong time.”

  “Fantastic,” Navarro said. “We didn’t have enough things buzzing around our heads.”

  “Jealousy is ugly, Navarro,” Vos said.

  Tanaka blinked as his HUD updated.

  “PHY’s up,” he said after a second. “RES too. COG got a bump. Shield Anchor and Bulwark look thicker. Aurora’s basically saying ‘be more of what you already are.’”

  Kaden saw the numbers slip onto his own display.

  [K. TANAKA – TIER 1 / LEVEL 5 – HEAVY ASSAULT (SHOCK OUTFIT)]

  PHY: 9 → 10

  AGI: 4 → 4

  COG: 5 → 6

  RES: 7 → 8

  AP: 5 → 6

  TRAITS: PAIN CONDITIONING

  SKILLS: SHIELD ANCHOR, BULWARK ADVANCE

  “You leveled what you already are,” Jax said. “Good. I don’t need you tricky. I need you standing up when everyone else wants to lie down.”

  Around the bay, other pings went off. A Theta-2 marine muttered about a RES bump for not panicking. A line trooper said something about recoil compensation. Little stat nudges. Aurora’s quiet bookkeeping.

  Jax’s own tag flickered briefly on Kaden’s HUD as she checked her notifications.

  [R. JAX – TIER 2 / LEVEL 13 – SHOCK LEADER]

  PHY: 9 → 9

  AGI: 10 → 10

  COG: 13 → 14

  RES: 12 → 13

  AP: 9 → 9

  TRAITS: COMBAT INTUITION, ANCHOR, SHOCK TACTICIAN

  SKILLS: BREACH ORDER, OVERWHELM, HOLD THE LINE

  Her mouth tightened at something he couldn’t see, then eased.

  “Nothing fancy,” she said. “Aurora just thinks I shouldn’t crack quite as easily and should see problems half a second earlier. Can’t argue with that.”

  “Wouldn’t dare,” Vos murmured.

  A low wave of talk spread through the bay as marines compared their gains.

  “RES bump,” Havel rasped. “Guess not panicking when my guts tried to exit gets you a pat on the head.”

  “PHY for me,” Perkins said, voice still shaky but stronger now. “Aurora says I dragged myself the right number of meters.”

  “Recoil comp,” a line marine said. “About time. My shoulder’s been bruised for weeks.”

  The background noise swelled: stats, skills, curses, a few laughs. The living sorting out what they’d earned for almost not being.

  It didn’t fix the gaps.

  Kaden’s gaze drifted back to Theta-5’s corner.

  One of their marines had woken while they talked. They stared at the ceiling for a long time, lips moving—numbers, prayer, curses—then slowly turned their head. Their eyes tracked over Theta-3, past Vos and Navarro and Tanaka, to Kaden. There was a hollow, raw look in them he recognized from the mirror after Jensen.

  The marine lifted their hand a few centimeters off the bed. It shook.

  Kaden raised his left hand and flexed the metal fingers in a small, answering wave.

  The other marine let their hand drop again.

  His eyes slipped along the row one last time. Occupied beds. Gaps. Machines softly beeping breath for those who couldn’t do it alone.

  “Kaden.”

  Jax’s voice pulled him back.

  “You did your job,” she said. “We all did. Whatever you’re trying to untangle right now, give it some time. Stand up first. Then we deal with the rest.”

  He nodded. It didn’t change the hollow in his chest, but he nodded.

  He glanced at his own HUD again, not at the skills this time but at the plain numbers.

  [K. MERCER – TIER 1 / LEVEL 3 – COMBAT MEDIC (SHOCK OUTFIT)]

  PHY: 6

  AGI: 5

  COG: 7

  RES: 7

  AP: 6

  TRAITS: TRAUMA RESPONSE

  SKILLS: FIELD STABILIZE (R1), FIELD MENDER (R1)

  The stats didn’t feel like numbers. They felt like expectations.

  Medbay hummed around them. Ceiling drones glided along rails with fresh bags and fresh kits. Med techs moved from monitor to monitor, checking lines, swapping cartridges, nudging dosages. Marines talked, laughed, muttered, bargained with invisible Aurora prompts.

  Tanaka scratched at his beard again, eyes tracking some point on the ceiling.

  “Task Force Harrow made it out,” he said quietly. “Jax talked to Okafor while you were still drooling. Opp ship’s a wreck. Torps never came back on. That’s you two.”

  Vos tilted his head. “That’s all of us.”

  Navarro pulled the blanket tighter.

  “Song will be fine,” she said, almost like she was trying the words out on herself. “He probably just got routed somewhere else. Another medbay. One of the other ships. Right?”

  Kaden wanted to say yes. He settled for, “We’ll find out.”

  The cyber fingers on his left hand flexed when he wasn’t thinking about them. He watched them for a second, then looked away.

  The Valiant felt different now.

  Not just a ship he’d ridden in on, awe-struck and ignorant, but something he’d bled for and bled inside. Something that had nearly killed him and then let a med team and Aurora stitch him back together into someone a little different than he’d been before.

  Level three. New skill. New hardware.

  He let his head sink back into the pillow and closed his eyes for a moment, listening to the medbay draw breath. Perkins’s slow, steadying inhales, Havel’s teeth-clenched exhale, the ventilator’s mechanical sigh. He tried not to think too hard about the empty space in Theta-5’s row where Song’s name should have been on a bed instead of wherever it was going next.