Armor trees lined the bay in neat rows, grey and matte and waiting. Kaden set his chest plate on the bench and ran a palm across the inside, feeling for anything out of place. It was the same suit he’d worn in dozens of sims. Somehow it felt heavier now.

  “Check your seals,” Jax said, voice carrying easily in the smaller space. “Don’t trust Aurora to tell you what your fingers can find first.”

  Theta-3 spread out through their corner of the marine bay. Tanaka’s armor rig looked like it could stop a shuttle; Navarro’s plates were a size down from Kaden’s, lighter around the shoulders; Vos’s carried extra mounting points for his tech harness.

  Kaden hooked the chest piece up, felt the magnetic latches take, then gave it a short, sharp shake to be sure. The familiar whisper of auto-fit pulled the inner lining tight against his undersuit.

  “Mercer,” Jax called. “Tell me your role in one sentence.”

  He straightened a little. “Combat medic, Sergeant. Keep people fighting and not dying.”

  “Good start,” Jax said. “Make it two.”

  He thought for a heartbeat. “Shoot if I have to, patch after, if that’s what keeps us breathing.”

  “Better.” She turned her head. “Tanaka.”

  “Sergeant,” Tanaka said, already halfway into his armor. “I make the holes smaller and the enemy’s problems bigger.”

  “That’s a poetry award waiting to happen,” Vos said.

  “Vos,” Jax said. “Since you’re feeling chatty. Your role.”

  “Open the doors, break the toys, make our lives easier,” Vos said. He clipped his SMG to a magnetic mount and started checking the latches on his drone harness. “And complain, but that’s a freebie.”

  “Navarro,” Jax said.

  “Put rounds where they matter and keep lanes clear,” Navarro answered. No joke, just focus. Her brow furrowed over the rifle receiver as she eyeballed the chamber.

  Kaden caught the tiny tremor in her fingers before she forced them still.

  Jax nodded once. “That’s the version I want in your heads when you’re in a pod and somebody starts screaming. Not ‘I’m nervous,’ not ‘I hope this works.’ This is your job. The rest is noise.”

  She moved among them while she talked, not pacing so much as drifting, habit putting her where she needed to be. She tugged on a strap here, thumbed a seal there, flipped a helmet over to inspect the neck ring.

  “Mercer, check your med harness,” she said without looking at him. “Inventory by touch, not just a quick glance. If you can’t find an injector in the dark with your off hand, fix that before we go anywhere.”

  “Yes, Sergeant,” Kaden said.

  He unlatched the harness and spread it open on the bench. The layout was muscle memory by now, but he worked through it anyway. Top row: tourniquets, foam sealant, compressed bandage rolls. Middle: color-coded injectors—red for stims, blue for painkillers, green for clot boosters. Bottom: airway tools, trauma shears, patch kits.

  His fingertips brushed across everything in the order he expected. His breathing eased a notch.

  “Sergeant?” Navarro said, still looking down at her rifle. “What’s an Opp hull actually like? Not the sanitized briefing version. The real thing.”

  Jax’s mouth twitched. “You noticed the edits.”

  “Hard not to,” Navarro said. “They all cut away when it gets bad.”

  “Because the Hegemony doesn’t like showing how bad ‘bad’ really is,” Vos said. He didn’t sound flippant for once, just matter-of-fact. “Makes it harder to pretend they’ve got it under control.”

  Jax leaned against the nearest armor tree, folding her arms across her chest.

  “You’re used to Hegemony hulls,” she said. “Straight lines, predictable corners, standard lighting. Opp builds feel wrong as soon as you step in. Corridors are narrower. They like curves. Fewer right angles, more sweeping arcs. Makes cover weird, makes sightlines worse. Don’t assume the corner is where you think it is.”

  “Feels like walking a spine,” Tanaka said. He didn’t look up from fastening his gauntlet. “Did a run on one that was still hot. Every deck looked the same. You think you turned left; your gut says you shouldn’t still be facing the same bulkhead.”

  Navarro grimaced. “Sounds fun.”

  “Fun isn’t the word I’d use,” Tanaka said.

  “Lighting?” Navarro asked. She was chewing through her nerves by collecting details, the way Kaden had seen her do before exams.

  “Low,” Jax said. “They see better in dim light. Expect shadows, weird color temperatures. Sometimes they use pulsing patterns to mess with your depth perception. Helmets will try to compensate, but you can’t trust the picture completely.”

  Kaden glanced up. “Gravity?”

  “Usually close enough,” Jax said. “They don’t like drift any more than we do. But you may hit pockets where plates are overcompensating or dead. If your stomach lurches and your feet feel wrong, don’t panic. Plant, move slower, keep your muzzle pointed where it needs to be.”

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  Kaden hesitated, then asked the thing sitting at the edge of his mind. “And Aurora?”

  Jax’s expression tightened a little. “Don’t expect the hand-holding you got in the gym,” she said. “You have what’s in your neck. HUD, vitals, AP, basic friend-or-foe. That’s it. No friendly outlines, no objective arrows, no convenient highlights around targets.”

  “It’ll still log everything,” Vos said. He flipped a cable into a wall jack. “It always logs. That’s the hobby it never quits.”

  “It logs,” Jax agreed. “It will not pop a helpful prompt telling you when to use what. That part is on you.”

  Navarro blew out a slow breath. “So. Real bullets, real Opp, bare-bones HUD. Got it.”

  “Welcome to the fleet,” Vos said. “The UI sucks.”

  Kaden slid his harness back on, feeling the weight settle over his chest and hips. The straps bit in just enough to remind him they were there. He checked his sidearm, then his SMG, pulled the charging handle, watched a round seat in the chamber, and set it safe.

  “What’s our job when we go?” he asked. “Not exact target, but… what does a shock outfit actually do once the pods hit?”

  Jax pushed off the armor tree.

  “This is how it goes when things are working,” she said. “Pods hit the hull. Theta-1 and Theta-2 make first holes, secure an entry, start carving toward whatever Fleet pointed them at. Theta-3 lands where command thinks extra force or flexibility is needed. We get pointed at something that matters: weapons control, power routing, command nodes, engine spaces. Whatever will hurt the hull fastest if we break it.”

  “And if things aren’t working?” Navarro asked.

  “Then somebody’s screaming in your ear, a corridor you thought was clear suddenly isn’t, and you get to improvise,” Jax said. “Same job. More chaos.”

  She glanced at Tanaka. “You’ve seen the improv version.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “It was ugly.”

  “Which is why we talk through this now,” Jax said, “instead of you learning it while your visor is full of smoke.”

  There was a brief pause while that settled in.

  Kaden adjusted the fit of his shoulder plate, pressing the edge until it seated comfortably against the chest piece. The inner ratchets whirred as they locked. The suit felt like a shell that would delay a bullet, not stop the world from getting in.

  “Any of you forget how stripped down your HUD is in a real breach?” Jax asked.

  “No, Sergeant,” they answered together.

  “Say it anyway,” she said. “Out loud.”

  Navarro ticked them off on her fingers. “No trap outlines. No highlighted cover. No glowing ‘objective this way’ arrows.”

  “No free tactical overlay,” Kaden added.

  “No automatic tagging unless we call it and Aurora decides to cooperate,” Vos said.

  Jax nodded. “Good. It’s different when you hear yourselves say it. You have guns, armor, your skills, and each other. You have limited AP. You will burn it faster than you think. So pick your moments.”

  Vos sighed. “So no Rapid Override on every cargo hatch that looks at me funny.”

  “I’d rather you saved it for locking down a response team or shutting something nasty off,” Jax said. “Make the power expensive because you might not get a second shot.”

  Kaden thought about his own bar, his AP, and how quickly Field Stabilize could chew through it if he threw it at every wound. He remembered Jensen in the Academy, bleeding out beneath that training node’s calm blue glow. All the overlays in the world hadn’t mattered then.

  This time, if he failed, it would be real.

  “What about comms?” Navarro asked. “We sticking to open squad channel, or are you going to want us on subchannels?”

  “Squad channel primary,” Jax said. “Platoon when I tell you. Keep calls short and clear. No running commentary. I don’t need to hear your every thought while you’re clearing a room.”

  “Kinda hurts,” Vos said.

  “I’ll apologize when we’re back in dock,” Jax replied. “Until then, keep it tight.”

  She checked the time in the corner of her vision, then looked back at them.

  “We’ve got a little over two and a half hours until slip,” she said. “Here’s how we use it. Next thirty minutes: gear only. Armor, weapons, med, tech. Then a short break to eat something from the mess. After that, we regroup here, talk entry profiles in general, and go over what happens if we lose somebody important.”

  Navarro frowned. “Important like…?”

  “Anybody,” Jax said. “But yes, we start at the top. Opp doesn’t care what rank I wear. You need to know who calls shots if I go down and Aurora throws my vitals into the red.”

  Kaden swallowed.

  “Tanaka,” Jax said, “if I’m out of the fight, you own Theta-3 until someone with more stripes takes it off your hands. Navarro, you’re his second. Vos, you watch what the ship is doing around us and tell them when the floor’s about to drop. Mercer, you keep everyone breathing long enough to argue about it.”

  “Nice even distribution of panic,” Vos said.

  “Welcome to service,” Jax said. “We all know the job. We don’t all have to like it.”

  She clapped her hands once, sharp in the enclosed space.

  “All right. Move. I want armor sealed, weapons checked, med harnesses tight, and tech gear tested in the next half hour. If something’s wrong, you tell me or Okafor’s people now, not when you’re strapped into a pod.”

  The little bubble of stillness broke.

  Tanaka turned back to his locker, wrestling his heavy gauntlets on with practiced movements. Navarro ran through rifle drills, popping the mag, checking the chamber, cycling the action until it looked automatic. Vos’s Wasp skittered up toward the ceiling as he ran a quick diagnostic, its tiny sensors blinking status in his HUD.

  Kaden lowered himself onto the bench to fit his greaves, aligning the soft seal at his boots and locking the shin plates into their rails. While his hands worked, his mind replayed Jax’s words.

  Opp hulls. Weird light. Minimal HUD. Limited AP. Shock outfit. High-value targets.

  Jensen’s face tried to surface. He pushed it aside and pictured Lira’s scar instead, a thin pale line above her eye she still bragged about. An injury you can walk away from. He wanted as many people as possible to get to brag about theirs.

  “Mercer.”

  He looked up.

  Jax stood in front of him, an armored silhouette with her helmet tucked under one arm. Her expression was unreadable for a moment, then eased by a fraction.

  “You looked like you were somewhere else,” she said.

  “Just running through what you said,” he replied.

  “Do it now,” Jax said. “Get it out of your system. Once boarding alarms hit, I need your hands, not your nostalgia.”

  “Yes, Sergeant,” he said.

  She watched him a second longer, then nodded and moved on.

  He finished the last of his armor checks on autopilot. Helmet on. Seal twist. Suit pressurization check. Hearing dulled for a heartbeat as the helmet systems took over, then normalized as the external mics came up.

  His HUD flickered, updated.

  [AURORA//SUIT LINK]

  Armor status: NOMINAL

  Squad link: ONLINE – Theta-3

  Tags appeared around him: Jax, Tanaka, Navarro, Vos. Each a small icon with heartbeat and AP bars, green indicators glowing steady.

  “Theta-3,” Jax said over the local channel. “Call out ready when you are.”

  “Tanaka, green,” Tanaka said.

  “Vos, green,” Vos said.

  “Navarro, green,” Navarro added.

  Kaden flexed his fingers in their gloves, felt the slight resistance of the material over his knuckles, the weight of the med harness across his chest, the SMG on its sling at his side.

  “Mercer, green,” he said.

  “Good,” Jax said. “First hurdle cleared. Strip helmets. Let’s go get something vaguely food-shaped before the galley decides to punish us for existing.”

  Vos snorted. “You’ve been in long enough to know that’s their default setting.”

  They broke formation, stowing helmets in the racks by their bunks but leaving armor on. The weight sat differently when you wore it to the mess; people tended to move out of your way without thinking.

  As they filed out of the bay toward the mess deck, Kaden couldn’t help checking the time again.

  A little over two hours and change until FTL.

  He couldn’t slow it. He couldn’t speed it up. All he could do was eat, listen, and get ready to step through a hole in an Opp hull and hope he walked back out with everyone else.