The auditorium doors stood open, spilling hard white light into the corridor.

  Theta-3 flowed in with the rest of the marines, boots thudding against the deck in a low, steady drum. The space was big enough to swallow a company and still feel crowded. Rows of retractable benches arced down toward a stage where the Hegemony crest glowed on a wide display, an eagle wrapped around a stylized star haloed in faint green.

  Kaden followed Tanaka along the outer aisle, the press of bodies warm on either side. The air smelled faintly of machine coolant, fabric, and too many people who’d rolled out of their racks in a hurry.

  Navarro slipped into the row ahead of them and sat, shoulders a little too square, hands resting on her knees. Her fingers tapped once, twice, against her leg before she visibly made herself stop. Vos slid in beside her, clutching a cup of something that was probably coffee and definitely old.

  “Lot of brass for story time,” Navarro murmured, just loud enough for their row.

  It was shaped like a joke. Her voice did not quite land on casual.

  “Maybe they’re here for your disciplinary hearing,” Vos said. “Crimes against marksmanship and basic humility.”

  She cut him a sidelong look over her shoulder, eyes a touch too bright, and lifted a hand to give him a small, half-hearted middle finger. She let it fall back to her knee without adding anything else.

  “Eyes front,” Tanaka said as he sat, voice mild. “Let them at least start talking before you start heckling.”

  Kaden slid in next to him. The bench vibrated as more marines dropped into their seats, conversation bouncing off the curved walls. Tags flickered at the edge of his HUD wherever he looked: Theta-1, Theta-2, logistics, shipboard security, a whole cross-section of the Valiant’s guts pulled into one room.

  On the stage, Captain Gaunt stood in the center, hands clasped behind his back. He wore the same black Hegemony uniform as everyone else, but on him it looked heavier. Commander Okafor waited a step behind and to his left, posture knife-straight, gaze sweeping the room in measured arcs. A cluster of officers flanked them, department heads and the ship’s XO, plus a couple of faces Kaden recognized from sim reviews.

  The ambient lights dimmed a fraction. It was not much, only enough to dull the edges of the room and push attention toward the stage. Conversations tapered off in uneven waves until the last pockets of murmuring died, leaving only the creak of metal and the hush of breathing.

  “Aurora, lock feed,” Gaunt said.

  His voice carried cleanly, no amplifier distortion. Kaden heard a faint chime in the implant in his neck. A green icon blinked once in his peripheral vision.

  [AURORA//SHIPWIDE]

  Recording: ACTIVE

  Gaunt let the moment sit, long enough for the room to settle. Then he spoke.

  “Two weeks ago,” he said, “this ship shut down nonessential activity so that all of you could spend an afternoon getting shot at by simulations.”

  A ripple of low laughter moved through the benches. It took some of the edge off, but not much.

  “You boarded a fake hull,” Gaunt went on. “You killed fake enemy marines. You took fake casualties and watched fake feeds of fake hull breaches. You did it well enough that Fleet Command now feels comfortable giving us something less fake.”

  He did not smile. He did not need to.

  Kaden felt his shoulders tighten. Beside him, Tanaka’s weight settled on the bench like someone had set down a slab of armor. In the row ahead, Navarro straightened a little, fingers locking together to keep them from tapping.

  Gaunt turned slightly and gestured at the towering main display behind him. The Hegemony crest shrank to a small emblem in the corner, replaced by a holoprojection of space. Clean grids and labels spread across the image, clusters of dots, ships sliding into designated points.

  “This,” Gaunt said, “is Task Force Harrow. HIS Valiant, assault cruiser and flag.”

  The Valiant’s icon burned steady at the center of the formation, a blocky wedge marked with its designation.

  “Light cruisers Aegis, Cutlass, Shenzhou, Harrow’s Wake,” Gaunt continued. Icons pulsed at the Valiant’s flanks. “Carrier Seraphim. Frigate screen and corvette escort attached.”

  More symbols lit up: compact frigate wedges tagged Pike, Tenzing, Yari, Khepri; smaller corvette darts marked Ember, Spark, Dart, Raptor. Kaden let his eyes track them, feeling an odd, distant sense of scale. He had seen formations like this in classrooms. Seeing one now with the Valiant at the center made it real in a way the Academy never had.

  “Task Force Harrow’s mission is simple to state and difficult to execute.” Gaunt’s hands stayed clasped behind his back. “We are going back into the corridor the Hegemony lost a month and a half ago. The one you’ve heard about in briefings, in mess hall gossip, in all the rumors people prefer to believe instead of reading reports.”

  The grid rotated. A stretch of space along one edge glowed in a dark red, hatched lines washing over it. Markers hovered there, representing destroyed Hegemony ships, their classes, their last recorded positions.

  Kaden’s gaze snagged on the old Harrow marker out of habit, the heavy cruiser whose name had been recycled onto Harrow’s Wake. Lose a ship, weld its name to the next hull in line. Tradition, or superstition, depending on who you asked.

  Around him, the air shifted. People were not just looking at the map now, but at each other. At the ones who had been there. Vos had gone quiet. Tanaka’s jaw moved, as if he were grinding something between his teeth.

  “We are not going to win the war by ourselves,” Gaunt said. “We’re not retaking half a sector on a single sortie. Our job is to push on the line, see who pushes back, and how hard. We gather data. We test their response times. We hurt what we can hurt without inviting annihilation.”

  The map zoomed again, this time on the corridor itself. A hollowed-out artery where Hegemony patrol routes had once been, now overlaid with Opp patrol estimates and contact points.

  Opposition hulls appeared as leaner icons. Their silhouettes were narrower, taller, a little off. Kaden had seen images in briefings. The Opp ships looked like they had grown into their shapes, plates layered like flattened feathers and hull lines curved a bit too gracefully for human eyes.

  “This ship was there when the line buckled,” Gaunt said. His gaze swept the auditorium. For a heartbeat, Kaden had the uncomfortable sense that it paused on Tanaka and Vos, then moved on. “You all know what that cost. Some of you were present. The rest of you have walked past the plaques on deck five often enough.”

  Kaden had. The memorial wall outside the main mess was not large enough for all the names to feel individual. His first day aboard, they had been marched past it as a matter of orientation. Stop. Look. Understand.

  The Opp in those reports had looked close enough to human at first glance: two arms, two legs, upright. The differences showed in motion. That half-second too-fast step, the way their heads turned a little farther than human necks should, eyes too focused. Whatever Aurora had done to their genome, it had not made them gentler.

  “Task Force Harrow exists because Fleet decided the Valiant is still a useful asset,” Gaunt said. “That means we have something to prove, to them and to ourselves. We are going back into that corridor while the wrecks are still warm. We are going to find out what the Opposition has done with the ground we gave them. And if an opportunity presents itself, we are going to take it.”

  He stepped back half a pace and glanced toward his right.

  Commander Okafor stepped forward to take the space.

  “From a marine perspective,” Okafor said, “that means the following. You will maintain readiness throughout transit. Upon contact with a viable target, crippled hull, isolated station, any Opp platform worth boarding, Theta Platoon will be called upon as primary breaching assets.”

  His voice had no softness in it. Not harsh, just trimmed of anything that was not necessary.

  Kaden shifted on the bench. “Asset” in that context felt a lot like a label on a crate. A thing you picked up and threw where it needed to go.

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  “Your evaluation performance,” Okafor went on, “demonstrated you can operate as a cohesive boarding element under controlled conditions. That is the only reason Fleet signed off on deploying you this soon. You met the minimum bar. Now you get to see where that bar sits in a real vacuum.”

  A couple of quiet snorts came from somewhere behind Kaden. Okafor’s eyes flicked that way. The sound cut off.

  “Make no mistake,” Okafor said. “You are not here to clean weapons and tell stories about Andromeda in the mess. When boarding alarms sound, Theta squads will be in the pods. Shock outfits first wave, line squads after. You will do what you were trained to do at the speed you practiced, without waiting for someone to tell you how not to die.”

  Down the bench, where the squad leaders clustered, Jax’s profile was all sharp lines and focus. She listened like she already knew most of this and was checking to see if anything had changed around the edges.

  “You will receive more detailed tasking from your platoon commander and squad leaders,” Okafor said. “For some of you, that will mean primary breaching. For others, shipboard security, prisoner handling, or damage control. Everyone has a role. There are no spectators.”

  He stepped back with the same measured precision. Gaunt moved forward again.

  “Here’s the good news,” Gaunt said. “You are not going in blind. Recon patrols, other task groups, and our own last outing have given us data. We know where we lost ground. We know roughly what they have there now.”

  The display flicked through snapshots of estimated Opp positions in the corridor. Patrol loops. A station silhouette with guessed tonnage and unknown internal layout. Clusters of escorts.

  He let that hang.

  “The bad news,” he added, “is that six weeks is enough time for an enemy to get comfortable and build habits. It is not enough time for them to forget how to hurt you.”

  No one laughed at that. A subtle tension rolled through the benches instead. Kaden heard someone exhale, slow and controlled, two rows up.

  “We slip into FTL three hours from now,” Gaunt finished. “Until then, you have time to eat, hydrate, and check your gear one more time. After that, we move, and there will not be much breathing room until the task force is certain what it is dealing with on the other side of the line.”

  His gaze swept the room one last time, pinning people in place for a heartbeat.

  “Make yourselves useful,” he said. “Dismissed to your chains of command.”

  The ambient lights brightened a notch. In Kaden’s HUD, the recording icon winked out.

  [AURORA//SHIPWIDE]

  Recording: COMPLETE

  Noise surged back in. Benches creaked as people stood. Voices rose over one another, bits of conversation cutting through the growing din.

  “…six weeks and they’re already sending us back…”

  “…Seraphim’s with us, that’s something…”

  Navarro twisted in her seat to look back at Kaden and Tanaka. Her mouth tried to curl into something like a smirk. Her fingers were still tight on the edge of the bench.

  “Well,” she said. “That’s… exciting.”

  Vos stood, stretching until something in his back popped. He set his empty cup down on the bench without looking. “On the Gaunt scale, that’s practically a pep talk,” he said. “He didn’t even use the phrase ‘acceptable loss ratio’ once.”

  “Yet,” Tanaka said.

  He rose more slowly than the others, like he was testing his balance against the news. “This is the part where we don’t give him numbers to work with.”

  Navarro blew out a slow breath, then pushed herself to her feet. “I’d really like to stay off any walls for a while,” she said quietly. “Just putting that out there.”

  “Same,” Kaden said.

  He meant it as steady reassurance. It came out very close to a promise he was not sure he could make.

  Jax appeared at the end of their row, weaving through the crowd with the kind of ease that came from practice. She stopped long enough to let her gaze move over each of them: Tanaka, Vos, Navarro, Kaden.

  “Theta-3,” she said. “On your feet. We’re not going back to bed.”

  Navarro’s usual quip caught on the way out and never left her throat. She just nodded.

  “You can sleep when we’re in FTL,” Jax added. Her tone was dry, but the current underneath it felt the same as Gaunt’s. “Right now, I want eyes open and brains attached.”

  She jerked her chin toward the aisle. “We’ll talk about what this means for us back in the squad bay. Move.”

  Tanaka stepped out first, letting the flow of marines carry him toward the exit. Vos fell in behind him and scooped up his abandoned cup on the way, dropping it in a bin by the door. Navarro waited until Kaden was moving, then slid into step beside him.

  “You heard him,” she murmured. “Three hours.”

  “Plenty of time to worry about it,” Kaden said.

  “Trying not to,” she replied.

  They were swept into the stream of bodies spilling into the corridor. The noise compressed, then expanded again as people spread out. Snippets of talk reached Kaden’s ears as they moved.

  “…Harrow’s Wake is still in shakedown, isn’t it? They’re really throwing it in already…”

  “…Opp’ll have dug in all over that corridor…”

  “…heard they boarded a destroyer, took the bridge intact, Aurora sat on the logs until now…”

  Kaden tried to let the words slide past. They stuck anyway.

  Theta-3 regrouped near a bulkhead just outside the auditorium flow, giving the worst of the traffic room to clear. Jax waited until they were all there, then started walking. Theta-3 fell in behind her automatically.

  As they moved deeper into the Valiant, the ship’s rhythms reasserted themselves. The hum of power through the deck. The faint vibration of systems idling at a different tempo than dock. The repetitive pattern of bulkhead ribs slipping by.

  “What are you thinking about?” Navarro asked, voice low, as they took a side corridor that led toward the marine spaces.

  Kaden kept his eyes forward. “Lira.”

  “Your sister?” Navarro asked.

  “Yeah.” He shifted his grip on the med harness strap. “I sent a message before we left Eridani. ‘I’m assigned, I’m fine, don’t worry.’ The usual script.”

  “She believe you?”

  “She wants to.” He exhaled slowly. “This is the part where I try not to make her wrong.”

  Navarro nodded once. “Then don’t.”

  He almost smiled. “That simple, huh.”

  “No,” she said. “But pretending it is helps. We’re not walking into this cold. We’ve been training. Jax knows what she’s doing. Tanaka’s built to soak hits. Vos yells at doors until they give up. You know which end of a bandage goes where. That’s more than some squads get.”

  “High bar,” Vos said from up ahead without turning around.

  “Eavesdropping again,” Navarro said.

  “You’re not quiet,” Vos replied.

  They turned another corner. The marine bay doors were open ahead, the big double panels retracted. Inside, Kaden could see armor racks, weapon stations, the familiar skeleton of their living space behind it all.

  “This is where we’ll be until further notice,” Jax said, half to herself, as she stepped through.

  The noise dropped a little inside the bay. Other squads were clustered down the length of the space, some already half in armor, others in tight knots talking low. Theta-3’s corner looked the same as it had that morning: bunks, lockers, armor trees, a rack for Tanaka’s shield.

  “Form up,” Jax said. “Loose semicircle. I don’t need parade ground, I need to see all your faces at once.”

  They spread out in front of her. Tanaka crossed his arms. Navarro hooked her thumbs in her belt. Vos fidgeted with the strap of his harness and then stopped when he realized he was doing it.

  Kaden let his medkit hang against his hip and tried to keep his hands still.

  “Here’s the short version,” Jax said. “We’re part of Task Force Harrow, which is heading into one of the uglier stretches of real estate the Hegemony owns on a map. Our job, as Theta-3, is exactly what’s printed on your file: shock outfit. When we get called, it will be to hit something hard and fast.”

  She let that sink in before continuing.

  “We are one squad in a stack of Theta units,” she said. “Theta-1 through Theta-5 are all assault elements. We’ve trained with them, we’ve fought alongside them, but we are responsible for each other first. That means we take care of each other before worrying about the others.”

  Vos raised a hand slightly. “You expecting contact that fast, Sergeant?”

  “I’m expecting the universe not to care about Fleet’s timetable,” Jax said. “Fleet says we hit the corridor after a certain time in slip. That doesn’t mean the Opp will politely wait for our arrival window.”

  That got a couple of small huffs of breath that were close enough to laughter.

  “We’ll go over gear again,” Jax continued. “Make sure your armor seals, your weapons take the right magazines, your implants are synced. You have questions, you ask them here. I don’t want anyone standing in a pod still wondering where their backup mag is.”

  Her gaze slid to Tanaka for a heartbeat. He gave her an innocent look.

  “Sergeant,” Navarro said, “how many other task forces have gone back in since… that?”

  She did not name it. She did not have to.

  “A few,” Jax said. “Smaller groups, recon pushes, nothing on this scale yet. We’re near the front of the line, not the back.”

  Vos muttered, “Love being trendsetters,” under his breath.

  Jax heard him. “If we do this right, the ones behind us get easier jobs. That should be motivation.”

  She jerked her chin toward the racks. “Armor first. Then weapons. Then we talk about what boarding a damaged Opp hull actually looks like instead of the nice clean rooms they give you in sim.”

  Kaden felt the familiar flutter in his chest settle into something tighter and more focused. It was not the full spike of panic he had felt in the Academy live-fire disaster, or in that sim with the Reaver. It was the weight of understanding that this time, if things went wrong, no one would call an end scenario and turn the nodes off.

  He unclipped his med harness and moved toward his locker.

  Three hours. Enough time to check every seal and strap twice. Enough time to open his kit and touch each injector, each roll of bandage, each tube of sealant. Enough time to eat something from the mess that would sit like a rock in his stomach and still give him calories. Enough time to think about Lira and then push the thought away.

  Three hours until FTL. Until the corridor. Until Theta-3 found out what it meant to be a shock outfit on a real Opp hull.

  He glanced at his squad again as he opened the locker. Tanaka, strong enough to carry half the room if he had to. Navarro, nerves showing at the edges but still standing straight. Vos, hiding his tension behind sarcasm because that was how he worked. Jax, holding them all in her sightline and ready to drag them through whatever came next by sheer force of will if she had to.

  Whatever waited on the far side of the dark, it was going to get them as they were.

  He pulled his armor piece free from the rack and set it on the bench, fingers already working the buckles.