The junction faded behind them, the wounded marine's tag shrinking to a tiny icon on Kaden’s minimap as Theta-3 followed Vos’s marker into the guts of the cruiser. The corridor tightened, losing some of the tall, open feel of the first stretch. Overhead, cables thickened into bundled trunks, some humming faintly, others sagging in loops that brushed the tops of their helmets.
“Route still good?” Jax asked.
“For now,” Vos said. “Local node says this service spine runs roughly parallel to the main access toward weapons. If they built this anything like sane people, we’ll hit a bigger junction ahead.”
Kaden’s boots clanked on deck plates that didn’t quite match. Some sections matte and black, others a dull, heat-scored gray. The lighting strips here were thinner, more spaced out, leaving longer shadows that pooled between ribs of metal.
His HUD showed Perkins's vitals in a small inset at the edge of his vision. It was stupid; he knew med would pick up the tag and Aurora would redirect the data to them, but he hadn’t turned the feed off. Heart rate floating lower, pressure creeping away from disaster. Still there.
“Mercer,” Jax said quietly. “Eyes front.”
“Yes, Sergeant,” he said.
He blinked Perkins’s window smaller and dragged it to the far periphery.
They moved in a steady trot: Tanaka up front with the shield slightly lowered but ready, Navarro on his right, Kaden left, Vos half a step back on the inside line, Jax behind them all, watching both their backs and the half-visible map Vos was pulling.
“Aurora’s giving you anything nice?” Navarro asked Vos, voice low, more to fill the space than out of real curiosity.
“Depends on your definition of nice,” Vos said. “I’ve got power draw spikes on the forward decks and enough encrypted traffic on their sideband that I could maybe build a career out of studying it. In about ten years.”
“So we don’t know what’s waiting,” Tanaka said.
“Correct,” Vos said. “We know it’s awake, though.”
The deck pitched very slightly underfoot, a soft roll like the ship had taken a glancing blow. There was no sound of impact, but somewhere deep in the hull Kaden heard a low groan of stressed metal.
Valiant and the task force were still out there, trading blows with whatever else the Opp had brought to the line.
“Contact?” Navarro asked.
“No structural alarms local,” Vos said. “That’s just the ship complaining. We’re not the only people tearing holes in it.”
“Focus,” Jax said. “We’re here to give Valiant a reason to come home with all her pieces. They can’t do that if these guns stay online.”
“Understood,” everyone muttered, almost in unison.
They hit the first minor resistance two corridors later.
Vos lifted a hand slightly. “Hold,” he said. “Wasp’s picking movement ahead.”
Kaden slid closer to the left wall, weapon up. Tanaka brought the shield back up properly, angling it forward to cover the bend in the corridor. The air felt warmer here, tinged with the scent of overheated electronics.
“Two Opps at the corner,” Vos said. “They’re not set up, looks like they just got here. One’s watching down our corridor, one’s watching the cross.”
“Quick and dirty,” Jax said. “Tanaka walks. Navarro and Mercer, you slice when they show. Vos, keep your head down unless you see something you hate.”
Nobody needed more than that.
Tanaka advanced, shield up. Opp fire stuttered as one of the defenders finally noticed movement and panicked a burst down the hallway. The rounds hit the shield high, skittering off into the ceiling.
Kaden leaned right, saw a shoulder and half a helmet, and put a burst into the gap. The Opp staggered, dropped behind cover. Navarro’s next burst hit the edge of the corner and bit into whatever was hiding there.
The second Opp tried to swing around into the cross-corridor, maybe angling for a flank. Vos, already watching that corner, snapped his SMG up and stitched a clean line into the exposed leg and hip. The Opp crumpled sideways into view. A second quick burst finished the job.
“Clear,” Vos said.
“Move,” Jax replied. No praise, no commentary. It was work done.
The two dead Opp were lighter-armored than the first wave, probably a responding fireteam, not a dedicated chokepoint guard. Their blood pooled sluggishly in the slight slope of the deck, mixing with some kind of thin coolant that smelled faintly sweet and wrong.
Kaden forced his eyes away from the way it ran.
“Junction up ahead,” Vos said a minute later. “This will be it.”
He wasn’t wrong.
The corridor opened into a broader node, a squat, four-way intersection with a higher ceiling. Thick conduits ran like ribs along the upper half of the room, then vanished through armored housings into the bulkheads. The deck here was reinforced with darker plates, textured for grip. It felt like a place where traffic converged.
On Kaden’s HUD, new options blossomed.
[LOCAL NODE – ACCESS SPINE N-7]
PATHWAYS:
- FORWARD – MAIN ACCESS // HIGH TRAFFIC
- PORT – SERVICE TUNNEL // RESTRICTED
- STARBOARD – SECONDARY ACCESS // LOW TRAFFIC
- AFT – BACKTRACK
Vos hissed quietly. “Well. That’s a choice.”
“Talk to me,” Jax said.
“Forward,” Vos said, nodding down the widest corridor, “is the main route. That’s the nice straight path that takes you toward big glowing ‘please shoot me’ signage. I’m seeing heavy power and a lot of Opp traffic on passive scan.”
The forward corridor was wider and brighter than the others. The deck sloped a little, leading deeper into the ship. Even from here Kaden could see patterns that made him uneasy. Little alcoves along the walls, overhead beams that would make good cover for shooters, a slight jog thirty meters in that would break line of sight just enough for someone to set up a nasty crossfire.
It might as well have had a sign that said KILL ZONE in big block letters.
“Port?” Jax asked.
Vos glanced left. That corridor was narrower, the entrance half-choked with a bulky piece of equipment that looked like someone had grown a metal tumor out of the wall.
“Service tunnel,” Vos said. “Restricted access. I’m seeing system tags: power distribution, coolant reroute, some environmental controls. Low direct traffic, but it’s red-flagged on their internal security as if they care about what runs through there.”
“How restricted?” Tanaka asked.
Vos grimaced behind his visor. “Door is hard-locked two nodes down. They’ve got extra security on the trunks. I can probably get us through, but it won’t be subtle.”
“And starboard?” Jax asked.
“Secondary access,” Vos said. “Lower traffic, narrower, but… it loops back toward main. Think of it as ‘detour to another possible murder hallway.’”
“So forward is fast and suicidal,” Navarro said. “Port is slow and irritating. Starboard is pointless.”
“That’s the shape of it,” Vos said.
Tanaka grunted. “We take port. I don’t care how irritating it is. I’m not walking us into a corridor built like a firing range.”
“Agreed,” Jax said immediately. “Standard doctrine: if the enemy built somewhere that friendly to their guns, assume they’ve rehearsed killing you there.”
She stepped to the edge of the main access entrance anyway, just far enough to get a better angle. There were faint scuff marks on the deck, black streaks and chipped metal where something had gouged along the plates. Someone had already fought here, and recently.
“Look at the ceiling,” she said.
Kaden did. The overhead beams in the main corridor had attachment points—small brackets and stubs of metal. He could picture Opp marines hanging sensors or turrets there, or anchoring themselves to fire downward during a gravity glitch.
“Yeah,” Navarro said quietly. “No thanks.”
Kaden’s stomach fluttered. He could see it too: Theta-3 midway down that corridor, shield pulled forward, fire coming from angles their sims had never fully modeled, Opps using abilities in ways Aurora hadn’t written training packages for yet. It wasn’t hard to imagine Perkins somewhere in a place like that, chest cooked, slumping against a far wall.
“Port it is,” Jax said. “Vos, how loud is it going to be?”
“That depends on how much they like their security protocols,” Vos said. He moved toward the left-hand corridor, Wasp still idle on his chest. The service tunnel entrance was narrower than the others and had a bulkhead door recessed a few meters in, pale light bleeding around the edges. “I’ll need to burn Rapid Override at least once to crack the lock. Maybe twice if they chained it.”
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“AP?” Jax asked.
Vos checked his HUD. “I’ve got enough to do this and keep Wasp in the rotation. I just won’t be spamming tricks past that.”
“Make it work,” Jax said. “We’re not trading your AP for a stroll through that forward hallway.”
Tanaka chuckled once. “I was hoping you’d say that.”
Navarro rolled her shoulders, keeping her rifle loosely aimed toward the main access. “I’ve got their happy little drop of death if someone pops their head out.”
“Mercer, watch starboard,” Jax said. “Last thing we need is some genius looping around.”
“Yes, Sergeant,” Kaden said.
He took a knee at the starboard corridor entrance, SMG trained on the gloom beyond. This passage was narrower and darker than the forward one, lit by fewer strips and with more pipes cutting across it at head height. It looked less like a murder lane and more like something a support squad would use to skulk around.
His HUD stayed clean. No movement markers, no IFFs, no sudden bursts of Opp chatter.
Behind him, Vos set his hand against a recessed panel near the port entrance. The surface lit up in unfamiliar glyphs, then flickered as his gauntlet interface punched a translation layer over it.
“Aurora loves me,” Vos said. “Or it loves making my life interesting. Hard lock, multi-factor. Someone’s paranoid.”
“Can you open it?” Jax asked.
“Yeah,” Vos said. “But they’re going to know somebody touched their stuff.”
[VOS – SKILL: RAPID OVERRIDE (R1) // ACTIVE]
Kaden heard the faint, insectile buzz Aurora always made in the back of his head when a skill triggered nearby. Vos’s hand moved across the panel faster than it should have, fingers tapping glyphs in an order that didn’t match the display. His other hand flicked through a floating schematic only he could see, cross-referencing security strings.
The bulkhead door thunked once, then again, like someone had hit it with a hammer from the inside. A red band along the top flashed, then bled into amber.
“C’mon,” Vos muttered. “You’re not special.”
The door’s locks clicked. The red band dimmed entirely, replaced by a steady amber that pulsed once every second.
“There,” Vos said. “Compromised but not screaming yet. It’ll log a fault. If they’re watching everything, they’ll see it. If they’re like us in the middle of a fight, they’ll add it to a list and swear about it later.”
“Open it,” Jax said.
The door cycled aside with a grinding whine. Hot air rolled out at them, carrying the sharp, dry smell of heated metal and something like ozone. Beyond it, the service tunnel ran narrow and low, ceiling closer to their heads, walls lined with insulated conduits and segmented piping. The lighting was worse: uneven, some strips burned out entirely, others over-bright.
“This is disgusting,” Navarro said.
“Yeah,” Vos said. “But nobody’s going to set up a pretty ambush in here unless they really hate their own knees.”
Kaden glanced one more time down the main corridor. It was still, quiet in a way that felt wrong. His skin crawled.
“Port it is,” he said.
“Tanaka, you first,” Jax said. “Shield front, half height. We’re not treating this like a sprint. Navarro, behind him. Mercer, left rear of the shield. Vos, take the inside on the right. I’m last.”
They fell into the new formation without thinking about it, adjusting to the tighter space. Tanaka’s shield barely cleared the walls; every few meters it scraped a conduit or grazed a protruding bolt.
As they moved into the tunnel, the node behind them dimmed on Kaden’s HUD. Perkins's tag stayed small and steady.
Kaden let out a slow breath and refocused on the cramped space ahead.
“Keep an eye on your heads,” Tanaka said. “If we lose the shield because it gets hung up on a pipe, I’m going to be cranky.”
“You’re always cranky,” Vos said.
“More cranky,” Tanaka said.
Jax let that wash past without comment. “Vos, anything clever you can do about our signature?”
“Not much from here without burning more AP than I like,” Vos said. “We’ve already poked their security once. I can throw a Ghost Ping down the main corridor, make their sensors think someone’s moving that way, but if they’ve got half a brain they’ll check and figure out nothing’s actually there.”
“How much?” Jax asked.
“Cheap at R1,” Vos said. “Just not free.”
Jax thought for a beat. Kaden could almost hear her weighing AP versus the value of misleading an enemy who’d already had surprise taken from them.
“Do it,” she said. “If it buys Theta-1 thirty seconds somewhere else, I don’t care if they catch on eventually.”
“On it,” Vos said.
[VOS – SKILL: GHOST PING (R1) // ACTIVE]
On Kaden’s HUD, a phantom trace flickered briefly down the main forward corridor back in the junction they’d left—like a ghost version of their own IFFs sprinting into the kill lane.
“Sensor spoof on their local net,” Vos said. “To them, it looks like a squad-sized contact took the obvious path. That should shake some attention off this direction for a bit.”
“Assuming they believe their tools,” Navarro said.
“Everybody believes their tools when the ship’s on fire,” Vos said.
“Enough talk,” Jax said. “Eyes and muzzles forward. The more time we spend here, the more chances they have to get clever.”
They advanced deeper into the service tunnel.
The air grew hotter, prickling at Kaden’s face where the helmet seals met skin. Somewhere nearby, pumps thumped in an irregular rhythm, sending vibrations through the walls. He could feel the ship working around them, rerouting heat and power and atmosphere while the battle outside rattled its bones.
They took one more corner, this one tighter, forcing Tanaka to pivot carefully to keep the shield from wedging.
Kaden’s boots clanged on a grating section, the sound different, hollower. He glanced down and saw the floor cut away beneath the grating, opening onto a drop into darkness threaded with more conduits.
“Watch your feet,” he said. “No face-planting into whatever’s down there.”
“Appreciate the professional guidance,” Vos said. “I’ll try not to fall to my death.”
They crossed the grating without incident. Somewhere ahead, a faint pulsing red light painted the walls for a moment, then vanished as they passed.
Kaden’s AP counter glowed at the edge of his HUD: 4/5. Field Stabilize was on cooldown, but only in the sense that he’d feel it in his muscles if he tried to do something that precise again too soon. He flexed his fingers around the SMG, feeling the slight tremor that always came after he pumped someone full of drugs under fire.
“Don’t,” he told himself, quietly enough that the mic didn’t catch it.
“Don’t what?” Navarro asked, ahead of him.
“Nothing,” Kaden said.
Jax didn’t press. They all had their own whispers going on.
The tunnel sloped up slightly, then down again. At one point, gravity stuttered—just a tiny staccato bump, like the ship had tripped over something in sliplane. Their boots lifted a fraction then settled.
“That wasn’t us,” Vos said.
“Opp tricks?” Navarro asked.
“Could be damage routing power through places it shouldn’t go,” Vos said. “Could be someone on their side pressing buttons labeled ‘make boarders unhappy.’ I can’t see enough to say which.”
Kaden didn’t like the idea of Opp standing somewhere safe, poking at Aurora-linked systems to make boarding parties stumble.
“They’re not the only ones with guesses,” Jax said. “Stay loose in your knees. If gravity goes weird, don’t fight it, ride it.”
Kaden rolled his ankles once, making sure his balance was where it needed to be.
They rounded another bend, and the tunnel finally began to widen.
Ahead, the cramped walls opened back into something more like a proper corridor—still not as wide as the main access, but enough that Tanaka’s shield stopped scraping every other step. The temperature dipped a degree. The air smelled less cooked and more metallic again.
Vos lifted a fist. “Node ahead,” he said. “And we’re close to something big. Power density’s spiking.”
“Guns?” Tanaka asked.
“Could be control routing, could be feed lines,” Vos said. “Either way, we’re not far.”
“Good,” Jax said. “We didn’t crawl through their intestines for nothing.”
They moved the last few meters cautiously, then emerged into another junction—this one less of an open crossroads and more of a T.
Straight ahead, the service corridor dead-ended into a bulkhead studded with thick conduits leading upward. To the right, a heavier door with additional reinforcement bands arced away into darkness. To the left, a narrower passage sloped slightly downward.
Vos stepped closer to the bulkhead, eyes distant as Aurora overlaid new data.
[LOCAL NODE – WEAPONS FEED SUBNEXUS]
PATHWAYS:
- STARBOARD – ACCESS TO PRIMARY WEAPONS SPINE
- PORT – MAINTENANCE LOOP – LIMITED CLEARANCE
He let out a slow breath. “There we are. This is a feeder node. Starboard takes us toward the primary weapons spine—that’s where the big control rooms and primary conduits will be. Port’s a maintenance loop we might be able to use to come at something from an angle.”
“Do we have time to get clever?” Navarro asked.
“No idea,” Vos said. “Fleet is going to start yelling if these guns don’t go quiet eventually.”
“Okafor will yell politely,” Tanaka said. “Gaunt will handle the yelling properly.”
“Focus,” Jax said. “We’re not voting yet. Vos?”
Vos hesitated.
“Talk,” Jax said.
“Starboard is the direct route,” Vos said. “And since this is Opp, ‘direct’ probably means ‘defended like hell.’ If we barrel in, we’re going to hit their first layer of serious guns and specialists. The maintenance loop might get us closer to something critical without eating the worst of that, but it’s tighter than what we just walked and I don’t have a map beyond two bends. Their security wants me to ask permission.”
“Which you’re not going to do,” Navarro said.
“Obviously,” Vos said.
Jax stood still for a few seconds, head tilted like she was listening to something Kaden couldn’t hear. Maybe it was just her building a mental picture. Maybe it was Aurora giving her that quiet nudge of Combat Intuition she’d never admitted outright.
“Here’s the call,” she said. “We’ve already avoided one obvious kill lane. We’re sticking with that logic. We take the maintenance loop, get as close as we can without alerting the whole spine, then punch sideways into whatever we need to break. If it pinches us too much, we backtrack and reassess.”
“Copy,” Tanaka said immediately.
“I hate it,” Navarro said, “but I’d hate the alternative more.”
Kaden nodded once. “Tighter is fine. Stopping a plasma battery from pointing at Valiant is better.”
Vos sighed. “All right. Guess my knees didn’t hurt enough yet.”
He moved toward the left-hand passage, checking the panel set into the wall. The glyphs there were fewer, but the highlight on them was a deep red rather than amber.
“And?” Jax asked.
“Locked,” Vos said. “But not like the last one. This one’s more ‘hey crew, don’t wander in here and get cooked by a coolant purge’ than ‘this is a security boundary.’ I can nudge it without setting off bells, I think.”
“Do it,” Jax said.
Vos touched the panel, fingers moving more slowly this time.
[VOS – SKILL: RAPID OVERRIDE (R1) // ACTIVE]
Kaden heard another of those faint internal crackles as Aurora synced with foreign systems. The lock symbol on the panel flickered from red to amber, then to a sickly green.
The door slid aside with a hiss, revealing a downward-sloping corridor lit in pale blue. A faint mist hung near the ceiling, ripples forming where the air currents shifted.
“Coolant trunks,” Vos said. “Stay away from anything that looks like a ruptured vein. If it sprays, you don’t want to be in the way.”
“Duly noted,” Tanaka said.
Jax glanced back the way they’d come, then into the new passage. Somewhere deep in the ship, something boomed—dull, distant, like a drum hit underwater.
“Fleet’s still busy,” she said. “We don’t waste that. Tanaka, you know the drill. Navarro, Mercer, same lanes. Vos, you’re my eyes and my map until you run out of AP or patience. Move.”
They filed into the maintenance loop.
Behind them, the node dimmed again on Kaden’s HUD. Ahead, the air smelled sharper, colder under the heat. The walls sweated condensation in thin streaks, and the hum of power running just out of sight grew louder.
The ship felt closer here, less like a maze of corridors and more like a living thing, all nerves and arteries. Somewhere farther in, the guns they were here to kill waited, fed by the lines running around them.
Theta-3 followed the trunks and the tremor of distant impacts, deeper into Opp territory.