The corridor didn’t just get narrower. It started to feel hostile.

  At first, the access lane had looked like any other spine-adjacent passage they’d seen on sims—tight, armored, bland. Now the walls seemed to lean inward, every few meters crammed with extra conduit or armored piping like someone had decided to ram more systems into a space never meant to hold them.

  The hum under Kaden’s boots had picked up a new texture too. It wasn’t just a steady thrum anymore. It was layered: deep power flow under a ragged flutter of relays and smaller systems fighting to keep up.

  “How’s the head?” Vos asked behind him.

  “Still attached,” Kaden said.

  Aurora’s quiet status box in the corner of his HUD backed that up with less humor.

  [MEDICAL – MINOR CONCUSSION // STABLE]

  [LEFT EAR – HEARING REDUCED]

  [RIGHT SIDE – HAIRLINE RIB FRACTURE PROBABLE]

  [AP – 4/5]

  His skull throbbed in time with his pulse. Every breath tugged at the hot ache in his right ribs. The world sounded wrong: left ear half-deaf, full of thin ringing; right ear overcompensating, catching every creak of armor, every small noise in the metal around them.

  Vos’ vitals floated beside his own.

  [VOS – MILD CONCUSSION // LEFT FOREARM – HAIRLINE FRACTURE SUSPECTED]

  Vos’ left arm was strapped tight against his chest with a loop of webbing Kaden had pulled from the med harness; it wasn’t elegant, but it kept the bone from grinding every time he moved.

  “Arm?” Kaden asked.

  “On strike,” Vos said. “Hasn’t walked off the job yet.”

  The corridor bent gently, then tighter, following some invisible structure beyond the walls. The light strips near the deck had shifted from clean white to a tired yellow that made the metal look ill. Occasionally they flickered, dropping the world into a dim blur before sputtering back to life.

  “Feels like the ship’s getting sick,” Kaden said.

  “Power’s pissed,” Vos said. “We hit something in the spine and they’ve been shunting load ever since. It’s like watching someone reroute blood flow around a stab wound.”

  “Comforting,” Kaden muttered.

  A shallow buckle in the deck marked where their section had dropped into this access. The metal under his boots had a subtle give, a reminder of the moment the floor had torn loose. Kaden stepped over it with more care than he needed to, like it might decide to betray him again.

  “Any luck from the panels?” he asked.

  Vos moved up on his right, close enough that Kaden could see the ghost of his reflection in the tech’s visor. He pressed his gloved palm to a recessed plate in the wall. Opp glyphs glowed faintly under the surface, Aurora translating them into half-formed icons and guesswork.

  “Still hugging relays,” Vos said. “Power and control. This vein’s not running through the main control spaces, but everything in here touches weapons logic sooner or later.”

  “Nerves, not brain,” Kaden said.

  “Exactly,” Vos said. “You smash the brain, everything goes dark. You mess up the nerves and things start twitching when they shouldn’t.”

  He pulled his hand back and shook it once, as if the wall’s stress had crawled into his fingers. “They know this section took a hit,” he added. “Their systems are flagging ‘anomalous behavior.’”

  “So they’ll send people,” Kaden said.

  “Yep,” Vos said. “Techs, security, both. We’re not the only ones walking these halls.”

  Kaden’s left ear gave him a smear of nothing. His right picked out the faintest background noises: the ship’s hum, air moving through ducting, the creak of stressed metal. He strained for footsteps and heard only his own, Vos’ quieter scuffing behind him, the slight rattle of gear.

  “Wish the jamming would pick a tone and stick with it,” Vos muttered. “This half-static, half-nothing mess is worse.”

  “Can you cut through it?” Kaden asked.

  Vos shook his head, then steadied himself on the wall as the motion made his concussion argue. “Not with one AP,” he said. “Whatever they’re using near the spine is chewing every band Aurora can touch. If I burned the last point, I might get one clean sentence through… and then we’d have nothing for doors or toys.”

  “We’ll take the hint we already got,” Kaden said. “Stay alive. Regroup. Don’t die for a maybe.”

  Vos huffed. “That, I can work with,” he said.

  The passage narrowed suddenly as an armored coolant pipe bulged out of the left wall, running from floor to ceiling like a spine pushed through skin. It ate half the corridor’s width.

  “Great,” Vos said. “They built a choke.”

  “If there was another trap set up like the one upstairs, we’d already be paste,” Kaden said.

  “That’s… one way to be optimistic,” Vos said.

  They had to turn sideways to squeeze past, one at a time, armor scraping with a hollow rasp. The coolant pipe radiated a faint chill through its insulation; beyond that, Kaden could feel the hot weight of something big drawing power somewhere nearby.

  On the far side of the pipe, the corridor bent left. The hum grew louder here, the sound of a ship’s organs working too hard.

  “You ever think about what this looks like to them?” Vos asked as they walked. “Their damage control teams, I mean.”

  “Not really,” Kaden said. “Been busy thinking about not dying.”

  Vos snorted softly. “Fair,” he said. “Just… picture it. Two of their techs come down here on an alarm. Relays are screaming. Panels are sparking. They turn the corner and find their buddies shredded, guns missing, consoles a mess. They call it sabotage and start hunting ghosts.”

  “Good,” Kaden said. “Means they’re not pointing torpedoes at Valiant.”

  “‘Ghosts’ is still us,” Vos said. “Just saying.”

  The lights flickered again, dropping to a dim glow for a long heartbeat. Aurora juiced Kaden’s low-light for a moment, brightening the world to an ugly overclarity. Then the strips spat back to full power and his HUD had to drag the enhancement down, leaving spots dancing in his vision.

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  “You see that?” he asked.

  “Oh yeah,” Vos said. “Just a perfectly stable environment, Doc. Nothing to worry about.”

  “Stop calling me that,” Kaden said automatically.

  “Earned it,” Vos said.

  “Not yet,” Kaden said.

  Vos didn’t argue, which somehow felt worse.

  They walked in silence for a dozen meters. The corridor bent again, following some unseen curve of the weapons spine around them.

  Kaden’s ribs complained, each breath sending a small spike of pain. His left ear whined. Sweat collected at the base of his neck seal. The taste of recycled air and his own stress lay flat on his tongue.

  He kept his SMG up, barrel down just enough that he wouldn’t brain himself on a pipe if he had to move fast. His left hand rested under the foregrip, more as a guide than real support; the pain in his side made it hard to keep both arms perfectly still, but he forced any tremor out of his firing hand.

  “You think Jax is still heading for main control?” he asked.

  “Unless the deck fell out from under them too,” Vos said. “We were on the edge of the stack. Tanaka, Navarro, Jax—closer to the spine. Trap was meant to peel us off, not take the whole group.”

  “And if it did?” Kaden asked quietly.

  Vos didn’t answer immediately.

  “We’re not going to fix it by walking backward into a blast door,” he said finally. “We do what we can reach. Their torps fire wrong, our ships live longer. That’s the part we can touch.”

  Kaden nodded once. “One thing at a time,” he said.

  “Exactly,” Vos said. “Walk, breathe, don’t die, break things that matter. In that order.”

  A low vibration shivered through the deck, different from the earlier tremors. It had that particular texture Kaden was starting to recognize as big guns speaking—Valiant’s or Opp, hard to tell.

  Aurora pinged a quiet notification in his peripheral:

  [TACTICAL – OPP TORPEDO FIRINGS: LIMITED]

  [VALIANT SHIELD LOAD – ELEVATED BUT STABLE]

  He dismissed it. Knowing numbers wouldn’t help his aim.

  The corridor tightened again ahead, the ceiling dipping lower as a bundle of armored cable runs drooped across like a mechanical vine. It forced them to duck slightly.

  “Feels like a crawlspace someone got ambitious with,” Vos said.

  “If the captain could see where we are, he’d probably have questions,” Kaden said.

  “He’d have heartburn,” Vos said. “Then he’d tell us to keep going.”

  They slipped under the drooping conduits. Kaden realized his shoulders were almost brushing both walls now. The idea of turning and sprinting anywhere in this crush was laughable.

  He slowed.

  “Hold,” he whispered.

  Vos stopped immediately. “What?”

  Kaden tipped his helmet, trying to get the most out of his good ear. He shut his eyes for a moment, not because it helped hearing, but because it helped shove visual clutter out of the way.

  Ship hum. That now-familiar flutter of stressed relays. Air moving.

  Something else.

  A faint clank, irregular, not synced with their own steps. Hard soles on metal. Light, then heavy. Light again. A pause. The faint scrape of armor against plating.

  “Boots,” Kaden said. “Ahead.”

  Vos edged up until he was almost touching Kaden’s back, helmet angled. “How many?” he murmured.

  Kaden listened harder. The concussion didn’t help; everything smeared. Still, patterns emerged.

  “Two,” he said slowly. “Maybe three. I hear two different weights for sure.”

  Vos was quiet, his own HUD likely running similar pattern guesses.

  “Yeah,” he said finally. “Two sets for sure. One heavier—more armor, or just a big bastard. One lighter. If there’s a third, they’re not moving much. Could be a panel tech.”

  The corridor ahead bent in a tight dogleg—left, then right again. Kaden eased forward until he could see the first angle, then pressed his shoulder to the wall.

  He didn’t step around yet. Instead, he slid along just enough to give himself a sight line past the second bend: a thin slice of whatever came next.

  The light there was worse—dim, yellow, flickering. An access alcove cut into the right-hand wall held an open panel, its guts glowing faintly. Two Opp occupied the space: one half-turned toward the panel, hands inside, armor lighter and more segmented; the other standing slightly out in the corridor, carbine slung low, muzzle down but held with practiced readiness.

  The panel tech’s posture was that of someone working fast. The guard’s posture was that of someone who hadn’t expected trouble but knew their job.

  Kaden pulled back.

  “Two,” he whispered. “Panel and cover. Looks like a relay station.”

  “Of course it is,” Vos said under his breath. “We’re in their nerves, remember?”

  “How close?” Vos asked more seriously.

  “Five meters from the bend,” Kaden said. “Tight space. They’ve got maybe a second and a half from seeing us to shooting, if that.”

  “Lots of fun if we take the gunfight,” Vos said. “Ricochets, overpenetration, no cover.”

  “Grenade?” Kaden asked.

  “In here?” Vos said. “We’d kill them, maybe us, definitely this relay cluster. Also we’d be announcing our presence to every Opp with ears or sensors.”

  Kaden exhaled slowly.

  “Backtrack?” he tried.

  “And go where?” Vos said. “Away from the relays we wanted, into a layout we don’t know, with jamming and traps and no idea where Jax is? We’ll lose any feel for where we are relative to the weapons spine.”

  “So we go forward,” Kaden said.

  Vos didn’t answer for a beat.

  “You’re not wrong,” he said at last. “If they’re working that panel, they’re either repairing damage to their weapons net or rerouting around what Jax did. Either way, leaving them alone is bad.”

  Kaden thought about Jax and the others, moving somewhere above them, fighting. Thought about Valiant out there taking fire. Thought about torpedo crews hunched over consoles, waiting for a clean firing solution that might or might not exist in thirty seconds.

  “Then we don’t let them finish,” he said.

  Vos shifted, armor rasping softly. “We can’t outshoot them cleanly in that alcove,” he said. “Not without getting chewed up. So we change the rules.”

  “Close?” Kaden said.

  “Ugly and fast,” Vos said. “Yeah. You crash the party, I shoot what I can see that isn’t you.”

  Kaden glanced back at him. Vos’ visor reflected the corridor, his own helmet, a strip of yellow light. It didn’t show the tension he could hear in the man’s voice.

  “I go first,” Kaden said.

  “You’re the medic,” Vos said immediately. “You get paid not to do that.”

  “You’re the tech,” Kaden said. “You’re the one who can make torpedoes misbehave. You drop, mission dies. I drop, you can still do your job. After you patch yourself, anyway.”

  Vos regarded him for a long moment.

  “That’s a very selfless argument for a conscript,” he said.

  “It’s a very practical one,” Kaden said.

  Vos let out a breath. “Fine,” he said. “You go in. I’ll try not to shoot you in the back.”

  “I appreciate that,” Kaden said.

  “You get killed, I’m going to complain about it,” Vos added. “Loudly. To your memorial plate.”

  “Then I won’t,” Kaden said.

  He checked his SMG again out of habit. Magazine seated. Charge good. Safety where it needed to be. The weapon felt heavier than it had that morning, not because its mass had changed, but because there was no backup hand to share the load if things went wrong later.

  His ribs hurt. His head hurt. His ear screamed a constant high tone.

  Group. Direct. Order. Alive.

  Jax’s voice, chopped up and pushed through static, threaded up through all of that.

  He closed his eyes for half a second, took the deepest breath his ribs would allow, and let it out slow.

  Then he opened them again.

  “On three,” he murmured. “One move.”

  Vos nodded once. “On your count.”

  Kaden set his shoulder, put his left hand further forward along the SMG’s fore-end in as stable a brace as he could manage, and leaned just enough to reacquire his mental snapshot of the relay alcove.

  Two Opp. Five meters. No room. No backup.

  “One,” he said under his breath.

  He felt the world narrow; not the freeze of panic, but the sharpened tunnel of Trauma Response doing its job. Targets. Angles. Distance.

  “Two.”

  His heart hammered. The ship hummed. Somewhere deeper in the hull, something boomed.

  “Three.”

  He stepped around the corner and drove forward, straight toward the two Opp.