The world snapped off between one heartbeat and the next.

  Kaden had his SMG up, Tanaka’s shield filling most of his vision, Navarro’s rifle barking in short bursts somewhere over his right shoulder. Red tags blinked at the edge of his HUD, Opp silhouettes slipping behind cover.

  Then his weapon vanished from his hands. The corridor walls peeled away into flat grey.

  SIM TERMINATE – TRAINING RUN COMPLETE

  The gridwork of an empty environment flickered for a second and dissolved. Combat markers faded. The weight in his hands became nothing.

  The harness unlocked with a soft hiss.

  “Helmets off,” Jax said over squad comms. “If anyone passes out, do it away from the expensive equipment.”

  Her voice sounded…relaxed. Not soft, but missing the hard edge she used when they were screwing up.

  Kaden popped his seals and lifted his helmet. Cooler air brushed his face. He could hear other cradles cycling open, boots on deck, low voices as squads shifted out of sim headspace and into ship again.

  Theta-3 formed up out of habit. Navarro shook her arms out like she wanted to punch something just to bleed off energy. Vos raked a hand through his hair and glanced up at one of the displays, catching a top-down replay of their last push. Tanaka stood as he always did after a run, breathing a little harder than baseline, eyes steady.

  Jax came down from the control platform with a slate in one hand, helmet clipped to her belt. She stopped a couple meters in front of them and looked them over.

  “Quick review,” she said. “Before you all start rewriting history in your heads.”

  She gestured at Navarro with the slate.

  “You first,” she said. “Better pacing. Last time you were trying to win some imaginary ‘most rounds fired’ contest. Today you actually counted your bursts before you pulled the trigger. You only got greedy twice instead of five times.”

  Navarro huffed.

  “So we’re grading on a curve now,” she said.

  “Progress is progress,” Jax said. “You still emptied half a mag trying to catch that Opp who kept dipping behind cover. The only reason you got away with it is because your feet behaved even when your trigger finger didn’t. Keep the feet. Fix the finger.”

  “Copy,” Navarro said.

  Jax shifted her attention to Vos.

  “Vos,” she said. “Door one was good. You shaved eight seconds off the last run, and the turret diagnostic was clean. But then you tried to read the entire subsystem map in the middle of a fight.”

  “I needed to know if I could route—”

  “You wanted to know,” Jax cut in. “What you needed was to open what I told you to open and not get shot in the head. You got away with it because Tanaka shifted his shield and Navarro noticed the angle. Don’t make that their problem next time.”

  Vos’s jaw tightened. He nodded.

  “Understood,” he said.

  Jax looked at Tanaka.

  “You did better,” she said. “Less ‘I am a bunker, you all live behind me forever.’ You gave Mercer space to work. You let Navarro actually shoot. I appreciate you not trying to be three marines at once.”

  Tanaka gave a small nod.

  “Felt…less wrong,” he said.

  “It looked less wrong,” she replied. “You still planted your feet too long in that last junction. You’re good at being where the bad things are. I need you just as good at leaving before they stack up on you.”

  “Yes, Sergeant,” he said.

  Finally she turned to Kaden.

  “And you,” she said.

  He straightened without thinking about it.

  “You kept your SMG up until we had air,” she said. “Didn’t tunnel on the casualty icon the moment one popped. Good.”

  He hadn’t even realized that until she said it. He’d felt the pull to sprint to the first red tag and had forced himself to clear the room first.

  “You did forget to visually confirm Tanaka’s armor warning cleared,” she went on. “You trusted the HUD. Next time, eyes on the seal. If you walk away because a little flashing light went quiet and you never actually checked, I will make it my mission to haunt your dreams.”

  “Yes, Staff—” he started, then caught himself. “Yeah. Got it.”

  Something amused flickered in her eyes. Gone quick.

  She looked over all of them again, a sweep that felt more like taking stock than searching for fault.

  “Overall?” she said. “You looked like you’d been here before. That was the point. I gave you a basic pattern to see if anything from the last few days stuck when the scenario wasn’t trying to be clever.”

  She tapped the slate. One of the overhead screens split into four angles of the same junction they’d fought through: Tanaka at the front, Navarro’s muzzle flashes, Vos ducked at a panel, Kaden moving in the gap.

  “It stuck,” she said. “Not perfectly. You’re still rough. But you’re trending toward fewer friendly-fire incidents and fewer heroic suicides. That makes me…moderately pleased.”

  Navarro blinked.

  “Is that—”

  “Don’t push it,” Jax said. “I’m not saying it twice.”

  Vos lifted his helmet by the rim.

  “So what’s next?” he asked. “Another run? Range block?”

  “Neither,” Jax said.

  They all looked at her.

  “You’re done for today,” she said. “No more sims. No gym. No surprise extra-credit obstacle course where I yell helpful phrases about your life choices.”

  Navarro stared like she’d misheard.

  “Done as in…done?” she asked. “Like, for real?”

  “For today,” Jax said. “Command wants you rested. Big show tomorrow.”

  “The company briefing,” Vos said. “Some marines in the mess said it was a war game.”

  “Call it what you like,” Jax said. “Captain Gaunt’s very excited about watching a lot of colored dots run around a capital ship schematic while he pretends it’s not just on a screen. He’d prefer those dots not be exhausted idiots who forgot how to hydrate.”

  Kaden raised a brow.

  “You’re actually giving us free time,” he said.

  “‘Free’ is a strong word,” Jax said. “Let’s call it ‘scheduled not-doing-things.’ But yes. I’m not putting you through anything else today.”

  Navarro narrowed her eyes.

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  “Is this like one of those Academy things where they give you an afternoon off and then the next day they drop a full inspection on your head?” she asked.

  “If it was, I wouldn’t tell you,” Jax said. “No, this is exactly what it looks like. You get food, shower, sleep if you can, lean against a bulkhead and contemplate your life choices. Whatever. Just don’t get into trouble.”

  “We’re marines on a battleship,” Navarro said. “Define ‘trouble.’”

  “If the MPs have to write your name down, it counts,” Jax said. “And I’ll hear about it before you do.”

  Vos cleared his throat.

  “You said you wanted to see how we act when no one’s telling us where to point our guns,” he said. “Is that why you’re cutting us loose?”

  “That,” Jax said. “And because I’m not an idiot. You beat yourselves up in the gym, you ran two heavier sims yesterday and a clean one today. We have a ship-wide evaluation coming. You do not build readiness by grinding people into paste right before you test them.”

  Navarro made a vague little motion with her hand.

  “So…what, we go to the mess and awkwardly stare at each other until we remember how conversation works?” she asked.

  “You go to the mess and eat,” Jax said. “I will also go to the mess and eat. If that happens to be at the same table, it’s because I’m curious what you complain about when I’m not shouting over gunfire.”

  “You don’t shout that much,” Kaden said.

  “Don’t tell anyone,” she said. “It’ll ruin my reputation.”

  She hesitated a fraction, then added, more conversational than formal, “And for the record? When we do the joint evaluation, I’m not going to be up in the control booth. I’ll be in a pod, same as you.”

  Navarro’s brows rose.

  “You’re dropping with us?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Jax said. “Proper stack. Me, shield, guns, medic, tech. You’ll see what it’s like when I’m crammed into a breach pod with you, hurtling toward an Opp cruiser at Mach-fuck and trying not to get shot instead of judging you from a balcony.”

  Navarro blinked once, then grinned despite herself.

  “That’s… actually good to know,” she said.

  “Good,” Jax said. “Harder to slack off if you know I’ll be standing right behind you when you do something stupid.”

  She jerked her chin toward the racks.

  “Stow your toys,” she said. “Meet you at the mess. You’ve got ten minutes. If you’re not there, I’ll assume you died on the way and start looking for a replacement.”

  They moved.

  Kaden slotted his SMG into the rack, thumbed the mag release to double-check it was seated right, then clipped his helmet on its hook. Soreness tugged at his legs when he bent; less sharp than the day after the sleds, but still there. He pulled up his HUD in the corner of his vision as he turned away from the rack.

  Nothing dramatic. Just the same quiet line he’d seen that morning.

  ADAPTIVE RESPONSE – PHYSICAL OUTPUT MAINTAINED UNDER LOAD

  Aurora wasn’t throwing confetti. It just kept logging.

  “Mercer,” Jax said as she fell into step beside him on the way out of the bay.

  “Yeah?” he said.

  “You looked less surprised when things went according to plan in there,” she said. “You’re allowed to enjoy that feeling when it happens. Just don’t get attached. Plans are like weather forecasts. Useful until reality decides otherwise.”

  “That sounded almost like wisdom,” Navarro said behind them. “Should we be writing these down?”

  “You can,” Jax said. “I won’t repeat them.”

  The mess hall wasn’t at peak rush yet. Enough people for a hum of noise, not enough to make the line painful. The smell of heavy stew and burned coffee hit first.

  They grabbed trays. The servers dropped the usual portions into place. Jax didn’t skip the line or ask for anything special; she took whatever was ladled out just like they did.

  “Middle,” she said, nodding toward a table not too close to the walls or the doors. “Easier to see who’s limping.”

  Navarro muttered, “She really does spy for fun,” but she went.

  Theta-3 took a bench. Jax sat at the end where she could see the room and them at the same time. For a bit, there was only the clink of spoons and the drone of other conversations.

  Kaden focused on his stew. His body had opinions about needing fuel, and those opinions were loud.

  Jax broke the quiet.

  “So,” she said. “How’d that feel compared to your first run on this ship?”

  Navarro swallowed and leaned back.

  “Less like drowning,” she said. “Still chaotic. But I wasn’t constantly trying to guess where everyone was. I knew Tanaka would be in front of the door. I knew Mercer would be behind him unless someone was actively dying.”

  Kaden nodded.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I knew Vos would be at the panel without having to look. Helps not wondering if someone’s about to sprint past you into your line of fire.”

  Vos’s mouth quirked.

  “Comforting to be predictable,” he said. “In the useful way.”

  Tanaka took another spoonful.

  “Felt closer to real small ops,” he said. “Not the big hits. The cleaner ones. When everything goes right for a few minutes.”

  Jax watched them while they spoke, her expression not as carved as it was on the training deck.

  “Good,” she said. “That’s what I wanted. The war game isn’t day one at the Academy. It’s going to expect you to already know what each other is going to do in a straight corridor.”

  Navarro eyed her over the rim of her cup.

  “How bad is it going to be?” she asked. “Compared to…you know. The things we heard about C17. The failed hits.”

  “It’s not C17,” Jax said. “Nothing about this is real except what you feel. You’ll hurt. You’ll think you’re going to die once or twice. You won’t. That’s the line.”

  Navarro made a face.

  “That really doesn’t make me feel better,” she said.

  “I’m not trying to make you feel better,” Jax said. “I’m trying to make you understand what it is and what it isn’t.”

  Vos pushed his vegetables around with his fork.

  “You trust it?” he asked. “The sim. To show anything worth a damn to command.”

  “It shows patterns,” Jax said. “How you move when you’re scared. Who you listen to when the plan changes. Whether you freeze when someone screams in your ear or whether you keep shooting. That’s enough for me and for Gaunt. Nobody’s pretending it’s a one-to-one with reality.”

  Kaden watched her for a moment.

  “You’ve done drills like this before,” he said. “On your old ship.”

  She shrugged.

  “Smaller,” she said. “Company-level, not full detachment. Fewer moving parts, fewer eyes. Less Aurora involvement. But the basics are the same. You get thrown at a problem big enough to overwhelm you and someone takes notes.”

  Navarro stabbed a bit of bread.

  “That is… not encouraging,” she said.

  “It wasn’t supposed to be,” Jax replied. “It’s just how it works.”

  Jax took another spoonful of stew, then looked at Kaden.

  “Why medic?” she asked.

  Navarro glanced down at her tray, giving him the space to answer.

  He set his spoon aside.

  “Someone died in front of me,” he said. “In a live-fire exercise. Final year of the Academy. Nobody there knew what to do. Including me. By the time the real medics arrived, he was gone.”

  Jax didn’t look away.

  “And you decided that wouldn’t happen again,” she said.

  “I decided I wanted to at least be able to try,” Kaden said. “I know I can’t fix everything. But I can fix more than nothing.”

  “Good,” Jax said. “Hold onto that. Just remember the part where you can’t fix everything. Medics who forget that burn out fast. Or do something stupid and get their whole squad killed trying to save one person.”

  He nodded.

  “I’m working on it,” he said.

  She gave a small grunt that might have been approval.

  Then she turned to Tanaka.

  “You,” she said. “You already did a tour. You watched a squad disappear. Nobody would’ve blamed you for asking for a station or a teaching slot. Why are you still here, carrying a shield at the front of the stack?”

  Tanaka held her gaze.

  “Because someone has to be there,” he said. “Better it’s someone who knows what it looks like when it goes wrong.”

  Fair enough, Kaden thought.

  Jax seemed to think the same.

  “Fair,” she said.

  She shifted to Vos.

  “Vos,” she said. “You’re not here because someone slapped ‘tech’ on you at random. You’ve already seen real hulls. You could’ve asked for a safer assignment. Why shock again?”

  Vos shrugged, small and precise.

  “Because Opp systems are more interesting than civilian cargo schedules,” he said. “Because somebody has to open the doors. And because I’d rather be the one at the panel than trust someone else not to screw it up.”

  Navarro pointed at him with her spoon.

  “See?” she said. “Control freak.”

  “Functional control freak,” Vos corrected.

  Jax’s mouth curved.

  “And Navarro,” she said. “Why rifle? You had the marks for tech. You could’ve gone signals, logistics, a dozen other things that involve less sprinting into fire.”

  Navarro chewed, swallowed.

  “Because somebody has to shoot the people shooting at my friends,” she said. “And because I’m good at it. I like being good at things. The aesthetics are a bonus.”

  “There it is,” Jax said.

  The edge came off the table’s tension. It didn’t feel like an interrogation. More like she was filling in blanks she hadn’t had time to ask about.

  “You all picked your roles for reasons that make sense,” she said. “That matters. When the sim feels real and your brain starts asking why you’re there at all, those are the answers you come back to. Not ‘because some officer put me on a chart.’”

  Navarro frowned.

  “You’re being…weirdly motivational,” she said.

  “I’ll deny it if you quote me,” Jax said.

  She finished her stew and set the empty bowl aside.

  “Use the downtime,” she said. “Sleep. Call home if you’re masochistic. Play cards. If you really can’t help yourselves, pull your sim feeds and watch them back. Figure out what you hate about your own choices before I tell you tomorrow.”

  Navarro snorted.

  “That’s the least relaxing relaxation brief I’ve ever heard,” she said.

  “It’s the only one you’re getting,” Jax said. “Make it work.”

  “What do you do with time off?” Kaden asked before he thought better of it.

  Her eyes crinkled at the edges.

  “Today?” she said. “Apparently I sit here and watch four new marines remember how to talk without someone yelling at them. It’s more entertaining than paperwork.”

  “Low bar, Staff— Jax,” Navarro said, catching herself on the title.

  “Just Jax works here,” Jax said. “If you start ma’am-ing me in the mess, someone will think I did something to deserve it.”

  She stood and picked up her tray.

  “You’re off my leash until the brief,” she said. “Don’t get arrested. Don’t volunteer for anything that involves a vacuum suit for more than an hour. And try to enjoy the idea that, for the rest of today, nobody is going to shoot at you. Not even me.”

  She paused.

  “And you did all right this morning,” she added, almost as an afterthought. “Try not to let it go to your heads.”

  Then she headed for the tray return, blending into the flow of other NCOs.

  Navarro watched her go.

  “She’s strange,” she said. “In a reassuring way. I hate that I find that reassuring.”

  “In an alive way,” Vos said.

  Tanaka nodded once.

  “She’s here,” he said. “That’s enough.”

  Kaden pushed his empty tray away and leaned back.

  His muscles still ached. His head felt overloaded with new information. Tomorrow they’d step into pods and onto an Opp capital ship that didn’t exist, with Jax in the stack and half the command staff watching.

  Theta-3 drifted into easier talk—cards, bad coffee, how many times Navarro was planning to “accidentally” shoot Vos in the sim if he blocked a doorway again. It wasn’t deep, but it was theirs.

  Tomorrow would be a different kind of test. At least now, Kaden knew exactly who he’d be standing next to when it hit.