By the time they filed into the auditorium, Kaden’s hand hurt.

  Not the sharp pain from surgery, that had faded days ago. This was a deep, nagging ache that sat in the bones that weren’t there anymore and hummed under the ones that were. The physio session with Liang had gone a little long, and the last few wraps he’d done had been sloppy enough that she’d made him tear them off and start again.

  Now the two prosthetic digits on his left hand sat still in his lap, resting against his right palm. He kept his fingers folded together so he didn’t have to watch the little twitches.

  Theta Platoon streamed in around him. The auditorium on Valiant wasn’t big enough for the whole marine complement and crew at once, so Gaunt did it in waves. Seats were already half full when Theta-3 came through the hatch.

  “Middle,” Jax said over her shoulder.

  They cut across a row toward the center, boots thudding on the metal deck. Navarro slipped into a seat beside Kaden, Tanaka took the aisle, and Vos dropped into the chair on Navarro’s far side with a soft grunt. Jax remained standing for a moment, scanning the rows, then slid into a seat at the end.

  Kaden’s HUD pinged a minor notification when he sat. His left hand had clipped the armrest a little harder than he’d intended.

  [AURORA//MOTOR ADAPTATION]

  Impact registered – no structural damage

  Pattern integration unchanged

  He dismissed it and shifted his hand to his thigh.

  Up front, the stage was bare for the moment. The last group—one of the other platoons—was still settling. Rows filled with armor, dark uniforms, shaved heads; a sea of tags in his overlay. A few glowed a muted amber instead of green: med restrictions, no heavy duty yet. Kaden didn’t let himself linger on the idea of which names those tags belonged to, or which names no longer had tags at all.

  Navarro bumped his shoulder. “You good?” she asked quietly.

  He kept his gaze forward. “Fine.”

  “You look like you’re about to punch that armrest.”

  “Thinking about it,” he said.

  She huffed a breath, then let it drop.

  The murmur of conversation faded as the side door on the stage opened. Captain Gaunt walked out first, uniform immaculate except for a faint scorch line on one sleeve that a brush hadn’t quite erased. Commander Okafor followed, tablet in hand, with a few other officers and staff taking positions along the back wall.

  Gaunt stepped up to the mic. Aurora picked his voice up without a test tap.

  “Marines,” he said. “You’ve been busy.”

  A few dry chuckles rippled through the room. Gaunt gave them a heartbeat and moved on.

  “Task Force Harrow was assembled for a specific purpose,” he said. “We weren’t sent here to wave flags and hope for the best. We weren’t sent to sit on a line and wait to be pushed. We were sent into a corridor we already lost once to make sure that doesn’t happen the same way twice.”

  The holo behind him flickered into life: a twisted path through Andromeda space, gravity wells marked out in pale blue, slip-access nodes pulsing faintly. Red icons showed the last offensive’s graveyard—ships dead in space, stations burned out.

  “Six weeks ago,” Gaunt said, “the Hegemony tried to take a bigger bite than it could chew. We lost hulls. We lost crews. We lost ground that took decades to secure.”

  The red dots pulsed once, like a heartbeat.

  “Last week,” he went on, “we put a crater where an Opp cruiser used to be and came back in one piece.”

  A single red icon blinked out. A stylized Opp hull appeared in its place, overlayed with blue shards radiating from where Harrow’s fire had torn it up. Valiant’s tag burned a little brighter than the other ships clustered around it.

  “The cruiser op wasn’t clean,” Gaunt said. “They kept more guns than we’d like. They hurt us. They cost us lives. But they didn’t take any of our hulls with them, and they didn’t break this task force.”

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

  There was a beat of silence that wasn’t about ships. Kaden felt it in the way backs straightened a little, in the way a few people’s gazes dropped for half a second. The wall on deck five didn’t need a holo.

  “Opp know that,” Gaunt said. “They know the signature of the task force that burned one of their ships and walked away. They know there’s a hull out here that doesn’t just trade broadsides—it puts marines in the places that matter. They are not a stupid enemy. They learn.”

  The holo zoomed in on a stretch of corridor ahead of Harrow’s current position. Red ships faded in and out as Okafor tweaked layers: pickets, patrols, heavier hulls hanging back.

  Gaunt stepped aside. Okafor moved up.

  “Commander Okafor, tactical,” he said. “Shenzhou and the scouts have been watching the neighborhood.”

  A few smiles, quick and tight.

  “You’ve all seen the summarized feeds,” he went on. “If you haven’t, your squad leaders will fix that. Opp patrol density ahead of us has increased. They’re not just putting more metal in space, they’re shifting how they use it.”

  The holo showed red patrol paths bending away from some slip lanes, reinforcing others.

  “In the offensive we lost,” Okafor said, “they met us line for line. Gun for gun. This corridor turned into a straight-up slugging match and we came out on the wrong end. Lately, they’ve been… more flexible.”

  The projection changed: little red blips appeared briefly near the edges of blue sensor cones, then vanished.

  “Short slip entries,” Okafor said. “Small hulls dropping out of FTL for seconds at a time and leaving again. Probe drones on weird vectors. They’re feeling out the edges of what we can see and how quickly we respond when something shows up where it ‘shouldn’t’ be.”

  Vos’ jaw shifted. Kaden didn’t need his HUD to know the tech specialist was mentally overlaying this on every board he’d ever stared at.

  “This matters to you,” Okafor said, “because a lot of your work starts when something red gets close enough for us to break it without getting shot to pieces in return. The cleaner our picture, the more likely that is to be a fight we picked, not one they handed us.”

  He flicked the tablet and the view changed again, focusing on the crippled Opp cruiser from their last operation.

  “Good news,” he said. “We confirmed that their plasma torpedo arrays are temperamental bastards. Disrupt their power routing and their targeting logic at the same time, and they lose a lot of teeth.”

  Blue icons marked boarding points and objective nodes along the projected hull.

  “That’s where you came in,” Okafor said. “You made sure we weren’t sitting in front of a full-strength torp bank while they tried to redraw the last offensive. That’s not something you’ll see in a recruitment vid, but it’s the difference between Harrow still being out here and Harrow being another line of red in this diagram.”

  He let that replay run once, then overlaid two more Opp hull schematics beside it.

  “Bad news,” he added. “They don’t like having their guns turned to junk. Since that op, we’ve seen at least two hulls with altered internal layouts—harder cores on weapons control, deeper burial for critical systems. They’re not going to make it as easy next time.”

  Navarro made a face. “So that wasn’t hard mode,” she muttered.

  “Felt hard enough,” Kaden said.

  “Going forward,” Okafor said, “you should assume the next ship you walk into will use what we’ve already taught them. Stronger doors. Smarter cutoffs. Redundancy where we’d prefer they didn’t have it. If it felt too easy last time, don’t count on a repeat.”

  He stepped back. Gaunt took the mic again.

  “Task Force Harrow is not withdrawing,” Gaunt said. “High Command likes the results they’ve seen so far. We’ve proved we can hurt Opp without trading hull-for-hull every time we open the throttle. They want more of that.”

  Heads stayed level. No one cheered. Marines didn’t cheer for “more of that.”

  “You’re going to see more sorties,” Gaunt said. “More days where your watch includes ‘board this’ or ‘screen that’ in addition to the joyful experience of shipboard maintenance and drills. Some runs will be quick and clean. Some will look a lot like the last one.”

  He paused, gaze moving across the rows—platoons, squads, fireteams. Kaden felt that sweep land on Theta as a whole, not any one patch.

  “You know what fair looks like,” Gaunt said. “This isn’t it. You’ve seen the wall. You know what this job costs.”

  The air seemed to tighten for a moment. Kaden’s mind supplied fresh engraving lines and the burn of metal under Aurora’s cutter.

  “What I can tell you,” Gaunt went on, “is that you wouldn’t be on Valiant if someone didn’t think you were worth the fuel and the risk. This isn’t a punishment hull. Harrow isn’t a dumping ground. You were trained for this kind of fight. Aurora and the Hegemony spent years burning numbers into your bones to get you here. They don’t do that for nothing.”

  The holo shifted one last time, showing Valiant in profile with her escorts fanned out around her.

  “You’ve proved you can operate inside their ships,” Gaunt said. “Now we’re going to see how often we can do that before they either adapt out of our reach or crack under the pressure.”

  He gave a small, humorless half-smile.

  “You don’t get to pick which of those happens first,” he said. “You do get to pick how ready you are when you’re called. That’s where your squad leaders come in.”

  He inclined his head toward the sergeants’ block. Jax had her arms folded across her chest, expression flat as armor plating. Other sergeants sat just as straight, different faces, same tension.

  “Commander Okafor has his doctrine,” Gaunt said. “I have my orders. You have your squads and your drills. Make them count. We’re not here to reenact the last offensive. We’re here to make sure the next map doesn’t look like that one.”

  He stepped back from the mic.

  “Sergeants,” he said. “You know what you need to do. Dismissed to your chains of command.”

  The lights brightened. The holo faded. Conversation rose in a low buzz as marines stood and started filing toward the exits.

  Jax didn’t move for a second. Then she pushed up and turned toward Theta-3.

  “On your feet,” she said.

  They rose with the rest of Theta Platoon, shuffling into the slow flow of bodies moving up the aisle. Kaden flexed his left hand once, felt the ache, and let it hang still.

  Navarro bumped him again. “Well,” she said, “that all sounded relaxing.”

  “Could’ve been worse,” Vos said. “He could’ve said we were going home.”

  Tanaka snorted. “You’d miss the ship in a week.”

  “I’d miss the cafeteria,” Vos said. “The ship and I have a complicated relationship.”

  Jax cut across their little knot with a look. “Save it for the bay,” she said. “We’ve got blocks to adjust and not enough hours.”

  Kaden fell in behind her as they filed out of the auditorium, the hum of voices and the low vibrato of Valiant’s systems buzzing in his bones. Harrow was staying in the corridor. Opp were changing their game.

  Whatever came next, it still felt like it would be out there, beyond the hull. Boarding pods. Ships in red and blue, slamming together in someone else’s sky.

  His left hand throbbed once. He flexed the chrome fingers carefully and followed his squad out, metal and flesh moving in uneasy sync.