The corridor hit back.

  Kaden burst around the bend and ran straight into the Opp, and for a second it wasn’t tactics or training, just two bodies sliding into each other in a space that was too small for both of them.

  His shoulder and SMG smashed into the tech’s chest, driving the Opp back into the wall hard enough that the guard's carbine between them squealed against the plating. Armor buckled, rebounded. Air punched out of the guard in a nasty grunt.

  Kaden’s boot skidded on a smear of coolant or condensation on the deck. For a heartbeat he felt his balance go. His heel scraped metal, searching for purchase. The only thing keeping him upright was the fact that he couldn’t actually fall. There wasn’t room. The guard’s body and the wall held him there.

  Behind him, Vos swung around the bend a half-beat later and nearly ran into Kaden’s back. He swore and sidestepped, his boot clipping Kaden’s ankle on the way. The corridor didn’t have enough width for that either. His shoulder hit the opposite wall with a solid thud.

  Everything was too close. Too loud. Too much.

  The panel tech turned away from the open relay console, one hand braced on the panel, the other diving for his thigh.

  Vos saw the motion and didn’t bother sorting the rest out. He shoved off the wall with his good shoulder and brought his SMG up one-handed. His injured arm stayed strapped tight to his chest, useless weight.

  The muzzle scraped the wall. His elbow clipped a conduit junction. The gun wobbled more than he liked.

  He pulled the trigger anyway.

  The three-round burst was ugly.

  The first round tore a chunk out of the alcove lip, showering the panel tech with metal chips.

  The second hit home, low into the Opp tech’s upper arm. Armor cracked. Flesh gave. The impact spun the Opp sideways and pitched him half over the console edge. His hand slipped away from the knife sheath on his thigh.

  The third bullet caught lower, in the meat of the hip. It twisted his stance and smashed him further into the panel housing.

  The tech screamed. The sound bounced off the walls and came back wrong, overlapping itself in Kaden’s ears, loud in his right, just a dull, tearing pressure in his damaged left.

  Kaden wrenched at his SMG, trying to bring it down to bear. The carbine trapped between him and the guard’s armor jammed into his side, gouging his already bruised ribs. His own weapon’s foregrip hooked on the Opp’s chest plate. The sling snagged on a protruding mag pouch.

  He tried to back up to clear space and hit the heel of his boot on Vos’ foot. Vos had nowhere to go either, pressed against the opposite wall. For a stupid, panicked second Kaden felt like he was pinned between his own squadmate and the enemy, welded into the corridor.

  The guard dragged air in and shoved.

  He didn’t do anything fancy. He just leaned his weight and straightened his legs, trying to get off the wall. Kaden had momentum and surprise, but the Opp had mass. The first push forced Kaden’s shoulder back a few centimeters, enough for the guard to get his boots properly under him.

  Kaden grunted and shoved back, tucking his chin so his helmet didn’t smash straight into the bird's visor. Their helmets still connected with an ugly crack that rattled his teeth.

  He couldn’t tell if he’d hurt the guard. His own skull lit up with a new line of pain.

  “Knife!” Vos snapped.

  Kaden’s first thought was that he meant a knife on the guard. Then he saw the panel tech.

  The Opp had half-fallen across the console, wounded arm dangling uselessly. Blood from his shoulder and hip slicked the relay housing. His other hand, steady and weirdly precise, closed on the hilt on his thigh and ripped the blade free.

  It was short and brutal-looking, more sharpened bar than knife, dark metal that seemed to drink the flickering yellow light.

  There was no room for a clean thrust. He didn’t try for one. He lunged, arm low, swinging in a brutal arc toward Kaden’s side.

  Kaden tried to bring the SMG down across his body and use it as a bar to block. The stock smashed into the guard’s chest plate instead. The sling yanked at his shoulder. The barrel scraped the wall.

  Nothing moved where he needed it to.

  He shifted his weight and almost lost his footing again as his boot slid in the sheen of coolant and sweat and something else on the metal. His hip slammed against the wall. The guard jammed into him, pinning him even harder.

  Instinct flung his left hand out.

  He didn’t plan it. There wasn’t time.

  His fingers spread as he reached for the knife arm, trying to shove it aside.

  Blade met glove.

  For half a heartbeat there was just resistance, a heavy line of pressure against his fingers.

  Then that resistance slid.

  The knife sheared through composite fabric and armor weave and into flesh. It felt like someone had taken a hot wire and dragged it across his hand. The contact went from solid to nothing in a way his mind couldn’t process.

  The blade passed out the other side.

  For a second, his brain lied to him. His hand still felt like it was there, all fingers intact, pressure lingering. Then the feedback stopped. His hand felt wrong. Lighter. Off-balance.

  He looked down and saw why.

  Two of his fingers ended where they shouldn’t. The ring and little finger were gone past the middle joints. Ragged meat and shattered bone showed through the torn glove. Blood was already welling up, bright and obscene against the muted suit.

  The pain hit.

  It wasn’t a gradual ramp. It slammed into him full-force, a white-hot spike up his arm. It dug into his shoulder and chest and spine. His vision flared, the corridor blowing out into whiteness at the edges.

  He made a sound. He couldn’t have described it, somewhere between a shout and a raw, wordless snarl. It felt like it came from his ribs instead of his throat.

  His HUD went red at the corners.

  [AURORA//MEDICAL – SEVERE DIGITAL TRAUMA]

  [BLOOD LOSS RISK – HIGH]

  [STABILISATION – URGENT]

  The panel tech pulled the knife back, arm cocking for another swing, this one higher.

  Vos didn’t give him the chance.

  He lunged in, his boots slipping once on the blood-slick deck. For a terrifying instant he thought he was going to eat the floor. His shoulder hit the wall instead. He took the impact, shoved off, and turned the stumble into a body-check.

  His right shoulder rammed into the tech’s wounded side.

  The Opp was already off-balance from the gunshots and the console edge. The hit drove what little structure he had left into the relays again. His helmet clipped the panel, bounced off. The knife arm jerked wide, the blade scraping sparks off metal instead of hitting Kaden again.

  Vos rode the impact in close, chest to chest, his own helmet smashing into the tech’s with a messy, desperate headbutt. It wasn’t at the perfect angle. His helmet slid, crunching across irregular contours.

  The shock still hit both of them.

  Vos’ vision went black around the edges for half a second. His brain chimed in with its own complaint.

  Concussion already, remember?

  He ignored it.

  The tech’s knees buckled. He sagged against the panel, knife hand dropping.

  The blade slipped from his fingers, clattering to the deck between all their boots.

  “Kaden, down!” Vos barked.

  Kaden heard him, but the pain in his hand made it hard to process words, let alone orders. His body moved anyway, the deeper part that had lived through academy drills and live-fire sims kicking in while the shocked part stood back and screamed.

  He dropped his center of gravity, shoving forward and down.

  The guard, still clutching at Kaden’s chest plate, went with him. They staggered, armor scraping the wall, boots sliding in blood and grime. For a moment it was less a fight and more two people falling in slow motion.

  Vos fumbled for his SMG with his right hand. The sling had dropped it low when the guard’s elbow had knocked it aside. He snagged it and dragged it up between his own chest and the tech’s, barrel half-pressed against Opp armor, almost no room to maneuver.

  He squeezed the trigger.

  At this range, the muzzle flash was more a flare than a burst, strobing the alcove in harsh white.

  Rounds punched into the panel tech’s torso where armor was already compromised, then crawled up toward the neck seal. The tech jerked hard once, twice, then turned boneless, collapsing against the console before sliding down to the deck.

  Vos staggered with him, almost going down as his boot slipped in the spreading pool of blood, but caught himself with his shoulder against the wall.

  The guard used the moment to twist.

  Kaden’s grip faltered as a fresh wave of pain rolled into his damaged hand and side. The guard shoved off the wall toward the center of the corridor, trying to throw Kaden aside. Their boots tangled.

  Kaden’s right foot stamped down on something that had no give. It turned out to be the panel tech’s dropped knife. The blade slid under his sole and shot out, spinning down the corridor.

  His ankle rolled. His knee buckled.

  They both lurched.

  The guard’s weight slammed into him again, pinning him between Opp armor and the opposite wall. For a heartbeat Kaden’s feet barely touched the deck.

  The guard’s free hand scrabbled for Kaden’s helmet, fingers catching the rim, trying to haul his head sideways toward the steel. Kaden tucked his chin and twisted, but the motion dragged at his ribs in a way that made lights pop in the corners of his vision.

  The guard drove his knee up, aiming somewhere around Kaden’s thigh.

  Kaden made a half-conscious adjustment, turning enough that armor took the worst of it. The impact still rattled his hip and sent another flare of pain down his leg.

  His left hand was useless, just a trembling, sealed mess. His right clung to the SMG like a lifeline.

  He yanked it back as hard as his bruised muscles would allow, dragging the weapon down between their bodies. The stock caught on something, then came free. He didn’t have the space to get the barrel on target, but he could still use the weapon’s mass.

  This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  He twisted and slammed the buttstock into the side of the guard’s helmet.

  The first hit bounced off with a less satisfying thunk than he’d hoped.

  The guard grunted, his grip tightening reflexively.

  Kaden did it again.

  The second impact landed more squarely, right over some structural seam. The composite shell at that point wasn’t meant to take concentrated blows from that direction. A spiderweb crack jumped across the visor corner.

  The guard’s hand on Kaden’s chest spasmed, fingers slipping.

  Kaden sucked in a sharp breath. His ribs protested. He swung a third time.

  The stock broke something this time. He felt it through the weapon. The guard’s helmet snapped sideways and slammed into the wall. The Opp’s body went slack in that odd, total way that said the lights had gone out all at once.

  For a terrifying heartbeat Kaden kept pushing, trying to crush resistance that wasn’t there anymore, muscles refusing to register the difference.

  Then the weight changed. The guard’s grip peeled away. He sagged, armor dragging down Kaden’s chest before dropping to the deck with a clatter of plates and gear.

  Kaden let him go.

  He stumbled back, almost stepping on the knife again, and caught himself on the wall with his right shoulder. His boots slipped in blood and coolant. He slammed his spine into the plating to arrest the motion.

  The corridor was a mess.

  Two Opp bodies lay half in, half out of the alcove. Blood pooled under them, spreading outward in jagged puddles, following the micro-ridges in the deck. One carbine lay canted against the wall. The knife sat a meter away, dark blade wet and still.

  The relay console still glowed, status lights flickering like nervous eyes.

  Kaden’s left hand hung in front of him, and now that the immediate motion had stopped, his brain finally took in the full damage.

  The glove was torn open along the outside edge, fabric frayed and curled back. Beneath it, armored material bulged in a shredded flap. The last two fingers were simply gone past a certain point. No taper, no neat line, just torn stumps capped now in smeared blood.

  His hand shook uncontrollably.

  Blood dripped from the ruined glove in heavy drops. They hit the deck and mixed with Opp blood, spreading in ugly patterns.

  For a second the sight didn’t connect to the concept of him. It was like looking at someone else’s injury. Some part of him waited for the sim to crash, for Corin’s voice to cut in and call an end, for the HUD to flash EXERCISE COMPLETE.

  Nothing happened.

  The ship hummed. Somewhere faintly, distant weapons boomed. His HUD kept screaming.

  [AURORA//MEDICAL – SEVERE TRAUMA]

  [BLOOD LOSS – ACTIVE]

  [STABILISATION – URGENT]

  “Mercer.”

  Vos’ voice cut through the ringing.

  Kaden didn’t answer.

  “Mercer.” Sharper.

  He dragged his gaze up.

  Vos was half-leaning against the console casing, chest rising and falling fast. His helmet sat slightly crooked, scuffed from the headbutt. A fresh smear of someone’s blood tracked along the side of his armor. His SMG was still in his right hand. His left arm stayed pinned in the makeshift sling, the suit stretched tight over the swelling underneath.

  “You still with me?” Vos asked.

  The question felt absurd. They were standing in an Opp access corridor inside a hostile cruiser, surrounded by blood and relay guts.

  “Yeah,” Kaden said anyway. His voice sounded thin in his own ears. “I’m here.”

  “Good,” Vos said. “Because that looks like it hurts like hell.”

  He nodded toward Kaden’s hand.

  Kaden huffed something that might have been a laugh if it hadn’t broken halfway. “You have a gift for understatement,” he said.

  The pain wanted to fold him up. To drag him down into the blood and the buzzing and the shaking. His legs suddenly felt like they’d forgotten how to stand. His breath came in short, sharp pulls.

  Trauma Response caught the freefall.

  It didn’t make him calm. His heart still hammered. His hands still trembled. But it gave the pain a shape, a problem to fix instead of a wave to drown in.

  Stop bleeding. Stabilize. Move.

  He let his SMG drop on its sling. It bounced once against his chest.

  His left hand throbbed, each pulse sending fresh spikes of white-hot fire up his arm. He raised it carefully, bringing it into the center of his HUD, watching fresh red seep through the torn glove and drip from the messy ends.

  “This is going to suck,” he said.

  Vos’ visor dipped. “We already passed that exit,” he said. “This is the part after.”

  Kaden reached across his chest with his right hand, fingers fumbling for the med harness latch. For a moment they didn’t quite want to obey, shaking just enough that he overshot. He forced them steady and found the clip on the second try.

  The trauma panel popped open. Neat lines of sealant, tourniquets, injectors and gauze greeted him like the inside of Corin’s supply case.

  [MERCER – SKILL: FIELD STABILIZE (R1) // ACTIVE]

  [AP – MERCER: 4 → 3 (3/5)]

  Aurora overlaid faint guides on his HUD, where to constrict, where to seal. He’d seen the pattern before on other people. Perkins. Mannequins. Training sims.

  Never on himself.

  He stripped a narrow tourniquet from its slot and looped it around the base of the mangled fingers. Doing it one-handed was clumsy. The strap stuck to his glove, slid off, caught on torn fabric. His left hand twitched in useless protest.

  “Hold still,” he muttered to his own limb.

  He cinched the strip down.

  Pain flared bright as the pressure bit into shredded flesh and compressed vessels. His vision tunneled for a heartbeat. He heard himself let out a sound, low and rough.

  Aurora’s warning pulse shifted from frantic blinking to a steadier amber.

  Bleeding slowed. Not stopped completely, but the worst of the loss cut down.

  His hand still shook.

  He grabbed a sealant canister with shaking fingers. The cap popped off with a soft crack. He aimed the nozzle at the exposed ends of his fingers and squeezed.

  Foam hissed out, white against red. It expanded immediately, filling gaps, covering ruined tissue, building a spongy barrier over the mess. Heat bled through the glove where chemicals reacted with blood.

  The smell slid through his filters, sharp and synthetic, attached forever now in his head to this corridor instead of a training bay.

  He let the foam build, then eased off. The outer layer began to set, going from soft to firm.

  Aurora marked coverage as “adequate” in the corner of his vision.

  An injector dropped into his palm, keyed by the skill. He jammed it against a wrist port and pressed. It stung as it pierced the suit and skin, then flushed cool.

  Painkillers and clotting agents flowed up into his forearm. The fire in his hand dimmed, wrapped itself in something heavier. Still there, still angry, but less sharp.

  [FIELD STABILIZE – COMPLETE]

  [BLEEDING – CONTROLLED]

  [PAIN LEVEL – MODERATE]

  Kaden sagged back against the wall a little, more from the comedown than the treatment.

  Vos let out a low whistle. “Holy fuck, Kade,” he said. “I really hope that wasn’t your night-time-entertainment hand.”

  Despite everything, Kaden snorted. It came out half a breath, half a pained cough. “Fuck you, Eden,” he said. “I’m right-handed.”

  There was a beat of silence, then Vos huffed a short laugh. “Well,” he said, “guess that’s your silver lining.”

  “Yeah,” Kaden muttered. “Real comforting.”

  “Hey,” Vos said. “If you’re still talking shit, you’re still in the fight. I’ll take it.”

  Kaden shook his head once, carefully, then pushed off the wall. The hand still throbbed, but the joke took some of the wild edge out of his chest.

  He flexed what remained of his fingers very slightly. Pain spiked. He stopped. The foam seal held.

  Right hand still worked. Trigger finger intact. He could live with that. He’d have to.

  He snapped the trauma panel closed with more force than necessary, as if the equipment had personally offended him.

  “Your arm,” he said.

  Vos glanced down at it. The suit was tight around the forearm, the swelling subtle but visible through fabric that had lost some of its perfect smoothness.

  “Still attached,” Vos said. “Still hates me.”

  “Let me see,” Kaden said.

  Vos made a noise that might have been protest, then stepped closer anyway.

  Kaden ran his good hand gently along the forearm, pressing with practiced fingers. Vos hissed once, then again, but didn’t jerk away.

  “Hairline’s holding,” Kaden said. “You keep swinging the SMG around like that, you’re going to encourage it to change careers.”

  “I’ll send it a memo,” Vos said.

  Kaden tightened the improvised sling a notch, securing the arm higher against his chest. It wasn’t pretty, but it limited motion.

  “Try not to fall on it,” he said.

  “I’ll aim for my face instead,” Vos said.

  Kaden stepped back and really looked at them both.

  His gauntlets and forearms were soaked, Opp blood drying in dark swirls over the joints, his own dripping in tacky streaks from the ruined glove. Smears of red and black spattered his chest plate and thighs where bodies had slammed into him. Vos wasn’t any cleaner. His armor was streaked from helmet to boots, one side of his chest scrubbed in a half-hearted swipe where he’d clearly tried to wipe it and just ground it in.

  If anyone saw them right now, they’d look less like the medic and the tech and more like they’d crawled out of a grinder.

  The relay panel hummed, stressed, unhappy.

  “You think they were fixing the spine?” Kaden asked. His voice sounded calmer than he felt.

  “Or helping it ignore what Jax did,” Vos said.

  He pushed himself off the console casing and stepped fully into the alcove, careful not to kick a corpse. With his good hand he brushed some of the blood off the edge and leaned over the open guts of the relay cluster.

  The inside looked like the worst nightmare of a ship’s electrician. Layers of relays. Narrow logic cores. Cabling packed in so tight it seemed more organic than mechanical. Aurora highlighted certain areas in pale overlays: power distribution nodes, timing buses, targeting pre-processors.

  “Aurora likes this spot,” Vos said. “It’s lighting up like it’s Christmas. Charge timing. Target feed filters. A little power balancing. Not the big red ‘fire torpedo’ button, but stuff it talks to.”

  “Torpedo nerves,” Kaden said.

  “Yeah,” Vos said. “If Jax is after the brain, this is part of the spine. Break enough of this and the brain might shout ‘fire’ and get static back.”

  “Can you do it without burning AP?” Kaden asked. “We still need that for doors. Or turrets. Or something worse.”

  Vos considered the flickering logic tree, then nodded. “Yeah. This is more art than force. Rapid Override would make it faster, but I can do brute manual sabotage from here. Technical Savant’s doing enough translating.”

  “Then do it,” Kaden said.

  Vos planted his boots, braced his hip lightly against the panel casing to keep from slipping in the blood pooled around it, and went to work.

  His fingers moved carefully, tapping at interfaces, killing certain pathways, inserting micro-delays into others. He couldn’t read Opp script directly, but Aurora’s hints plus his own familiarity with system design gave him enough to map cause to effect.

  Kaden turned away and took up position half in the corridor, half leaning on the wall, SMG up one-handed, covering the direction they’d come from. His left arm hung slightly away from his body, as if proximity to anything might threaten the fragile seal he’d just built.

  The hum under his boots changed again as Vos worked. There was a subtle stutter in it now, like a heartbeat with a skipped beat.

  From far away, through meters of hull and vacuum, came a muted boom that didn’t sound like Valiant’s guns. Aurora tagged a minimal note in the corner of Kaden’s HUD:

  [AURORA//TACTICAL – OPP TORPEDO LAUNCH: ERROR / ABORT]

  He dismissed it, eyes fixed on the bend.

  Behind him, a relay clicked sharply, followed by a sizzle and a pop. Light on the panel shifted from a steady cyan to an uneasy orange.

  “You break something?” Kaden asked without turning.

  “Intentionally,” Vos said. “I’m feeding their torp logic timing data that disagrees with itself. Some of the sync signals are a couple milliseconds off now. Enough that the system will start seeing ghost misfires where there aren’t any.”

  “And when there are any?” Kaden asked.

  “Then it freaks out and dumps cycles,” Vos said. “Or launches bad. Depends how stubborn their crews are.”

  Aurora pinged another small notice:

  [OPP TORPEDO SUBSYSTEMS – ANOMALIES INCREASING]

  [FIRING SOLUTION STABILITY – DEGRADED]

  Kaden imagined Opp weapons officers staring at jittery targeting and unreliable charge confirmations, trying to decide if they trusted their readouts with a human, or not-human, fleet bearing down on them.

  “Good,” he said.

  “Give me thirty seconds,” Vos said. “Then we should not be here.”

  Kaden nodded, though Vos couldn’t see it.

  The pain in his hand had settled into a solid, pulsing throb. His ribs ached in time with it. His head felt foggy at the edges. His right hand held the SMG with a grip that was starting to cramp.

  His HUD quietly flagged mild fatigue, then shut up when he acknowledged it. Nothing in any of those warnings changed what needed doing next.

  Bootsteps, if they came, would echo weirdly in this corridor. Voices would carry strange. He strained his good ear and tried to filter the normal ship sounds, hum, creaks, distant thunder, from anything new.

  Nothing yet.

  Behind him, Vos muttered something in a language Kaden didn’t know, then, louder, “Okay. That’s as messy as I can make it without starting spontaneous fires everywhere.”

  He stepped away from the panel. The console’s lights were still on, but their rhythm was wrong. A few ran in stuttering patterns. One blinked an alarm color that Aurora tagged as “error state.”

  “You broke it?” Kaden asked.

  “I made it untrustworthy,” Vos said. “It’ll still think it works half the time. The other half it’ll tell them something’s wrong. Their torp logic upstream is going to be swimming in bad data. They’ll either shut this whole section down or roll the dice.”

  “Either way,” Kaden said, “Valiant’s happier.”

  Vos nodded once. “Now we go before someone else with a knife shows up.”

  He stepped over the bodies carefully, boots almost skidding once. His right hand shot to the wall for balance. The sling creaked as his injured arm shifted within it.

  Kaden pushed off his own bit of wall and joined him, SMG still up. He gave the dead Opp a last look, panel tech slumped against the console, guard sprawled on the deck, and felt nothing clean.

  They weren’t marines. They’d been techs trying to fix their ship.

  He walked anyway.

  “You still at three AP?” Vos asked as they moved.

  “Yeah,” Kaden said. “You’ve got one.”

  “Golden bullet,” Vos said. “We save it for when a door’s between us and either Jax or a very bad situation.”

  “Or both,” Kaden said.

  “Hopefully both,” Vos said. “Makes it a better story.”

  The corridor ahead bent again, away from the panel. The hum followed. Somewhere deep in the ship, things were getting worse.

  Kaden’s hand throbbed. His ribs hurt. His head rang.

  They kept walking.