They were halfway through pretending it was a normal afternoon when Jax killed the mood.

  Theta-3 had claimed a corner of the gym: one mat, four marines, and just enough space not to trip over anyone else’s workout. Navarro and Vos were doing light grappling drills, trading off positions and mock submissions. Tanaka was working through slow, deliberate lunges with a dumbbell in each hand, concentrating on keeping his rebuilt leg honest. Kaden sat cross-legged on the edge of the mat, running a length of elastic band through his left hand, opening and closing his grip against the resistance until the muscles in his forearm burned.

  Navarro rolled out of a hold and slapped the mat. “Tap, tap, tap,” she said. “Get your bony arms off my neck.”

  Vos let go and flopped onto his back. “You have no appreciation for the art,” he said. “That was poetry.”

  “It was an attempt at strangling me,” Navarro said.

  “Bad poetry,” Vos amended.

  Kaden smirked and twisted the band again. His thumb and index finger pinched, his middle finger followed, the two prosthetic digits tracking with the rest. Aurora smoothed the feedback so that, if he didn’t look, he could almost pretend they were just slightly stiffer versions of what he’d always had.

  Almost.

  Tanaka glanced over. “How’s the hand?”

  “Annoyed,” Kaden said. “But it’s doing what I tell it to, so I’ll take it.”

  “Get it used to gripping and working,” Tanaka said. “Next time you’re not going to be sitting on a mat.”

  “Next time,” Navarro said, “I am absolutely standing behind you, Kenji. Human blast shield.”

  Tanaka shrugged. “That is my job.”

  Vos sat up, forearms on his knees. “Your job is to not block my line of fire,” he said. “I’ve seen you. You’re like a walking wall.”

  Before Navarro could retort, the gym hatch hissed open and Jax’s voice cut across the space.

  “Theta-3.”

  All four of them turned.

  She stood just inside the door, jacket zipped, no helmet, hair pulled back tight. There was a different weight to the way she held herself. It was less like she’d just walked out of their bay, more like she’d come straight from somewhere serious.

  “On your feet,” she said. “We’re up.”

  Vos looked around pointedly at the lack of alarms. “I don’t hear klaxons,” he said. “Are we being stealth-deployed to the coffee bar?”

  “Move, Corporal,” Jax said, but the bite wasn’t as sharp as it could’ve been.

  Kaden pushed himself up, rolling his shoulders to shake out the ache. “What’s going on, Sergeant?” he asked.

  Jax jerked her chin toward the hall. “Command meeting,” she said. “Okafor’s reorganizing internal muster points and he wants Theta comfortable with them yesterday. We’re taking a walking tour.”

  Navarro raised a brow. “Muster points?” she asked. “We just did that whole ‘know your exits’ sermon.”

  “Now we’re doing it properly,” Jax said. “On your feet. Boots. You can stretch your feelings later.”

  They grabbed their jackets and boots from the rack by the wall. Out in the corridor, Jax took point for all of three steps before she tilted her head back toward them.

  “Mercer,” she said. “You start. Theta bay to Muster Node Theta-3-Primary. No HUD nav. Go.”

  Kaden blinked. “Yes, Sergeant.”

  He scanned the corridor, orienting himself. Right for the main ladder, down a deck, then cut through two lateral corridors past the maintenance closet with the missing hazard strip. The nearest primary muster node for Theta-3 was a reinforced junction hub with built-in blast doors and a comms panel. Okafor had shown them the schematic a week ago.

  He started moving. Theta-3 fell in around him.

  “So what did Okafor say?” Navarro asked after a few steps. “You look like you just got voluntold for something ugly.”

  “He’s in a mood,” Jax said. “Shenzhou’s been seeing things he doesn’t like.”

  Vos made a show of looking at the smooth bulkheads. “Please be more vague,” he said. “I almost understood that.”

  “Keep walking,” Jax said. “You’ll get the story as long as Mercer doesn’t walk us into a bulkhead.”

  Kaden took the next turn without thinking about it, muscle memory from the last week’s drills carrying him. “Shenzhou sees a lot of things,” he said. “That’s the point.”

  “Yeah,” Jax said. “This is… different. Left at the next junction.”

  He was already turning.

  “Different how?” Tanaka asked.

  “Let him get us to the node,” Jax said. “Then I’ll share the part that makes me want you knowing where to stand when things go stupid.”

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  No one argued with that.

  They passed a trio of engineers wrestling a storage crate onto a grav-sled. A pair of security ratings in black armbands stood near a junction, chatting quietly. The ship sounded normal—dull thrum of drives, occasional burst of PA chatter, the steady hiss of air through vents.

  Kaden found the hazard-strip-scarred bulkhead and cut down the side corridor. The familiar junction hub came into view: recessed doors, thicker plating, a wall panel marked with a stenciled stencil: MUSTER NODE // THETA-3 PRIMARY.

  He pointed. “Here.”

  Jax checked the overhead marker, then nodded. “Good. You didn’t forget where you’re supposed to run when people start screaming. That’s step one.”

  She moved into the node, letting them filter in with her. The space was only slightly wider than a standard junction, but the walls were thicker and the lighting more robust. A hardline comms panel sat behind a locked cover. The floor markings indicated standing positions for up to twenty bodies.

  “Okafor had us all up in the wardroom this morning,” Jax said. “Squad leaders, platoon leads, department heads. Shenzhou’s been running long-range sweeps while we sit in this nice little wedge. Last three days, they’ve picked up Opp signatures that don’t behave like the usual patrols.”

  “Define ‘don’t behave’,” Navarro said.

  Jax leaned against the wall, arms folded. “Drive shadows popping in and out at the edge of range,” she said. “Too regular to be noise, too irregular to be standard patrol routes. Energy spikes that look like active systems with no corresponding hulls. Stuff that smells like a ship in motion, except there’s nothing on scope when they swing the focus over.”

  Vos frowned. “Cloaking?” he asked. “Or Aurora being cute?”

  “Both were mentioned,” Jax said. “Shenzhou’s captain swears it’s real. Okafor doesn’t like unexplained. He especially doesn’t like unexplained that sits on the same vectors Opp used last time they kicked in our teeth.”

  Kaden looked around the node. With the blast doors closed, this space would be one of the few places on the deck with a double layer between them and vacuum.

  “So he wants us ready in case something decides to say hello,” Kaden said quietly.

  “He wants the whole ship ready,” Jax said. “He wants damage control to know which way to run when half the deck loses air. He wants security to know which corridors choke first. And he wants Theta to be able to get to a muster node, an armory, or a defensive choke without Aurora tracing a neat line on your HUD.”

  She pushed off the wall. “All right. You’ve seen this one. Mercer, mark the two nearest secondary muster nodes in your head. Tanaka, you’ve got the next lead. Mess hall to Delta-level armory. Move.”

  They stepped back into the corridor.

  Tanaka led them through the ship with the same quiet certainty he used when stepping into the front of a stack. Down a crew ladder, along a midline passage that cut past a line of storage lockers, through a narrow service corridor Kaden realized he’d never walked before.

  “Okafor nervous?” Vos asked as they went. “You said he was in a mood. More than usual?”

  Jax walked in the middle of the file, eyes flicking automatically to junction tags and overhead markers even while she talked. “He’s a professional worrier,” she said. “You don’t get to be platoon commander on a ship like this without permanently assuming someone’s about to light you on fire. But today he had that look.”

  “What look?” Navarro asked.

  “The one he had before we lost the Bulwark,” Jax said. “Two hours before we found out the Opp had a second line behind the one we thought we were breaking.”

  The corridor felt narrower for a second. Kaden remembered the name, the stories: the dreadnought that was supposed to anchor the last big push. The ship that had come back torn up but still alive.

  “What did he say, exactly?” Kaden asked.

  “He said,” Jax replied, “and I quote: ‘I do not like ghosts in my scope, Sergeant. I like plots I can predict and enemies that announce themselves by shooting at us. This feels like someone learning how we move and deciding how to make us regret it.’”

  Vos let out a low whistle. “Love that,” he said. “That’s so much better than ‘it’s probably fine.’”

  “Did he say it in front of Shenzhou’s people?” Navarro asked.

  “After,” Jax said. “He kept the first part of the brief polite. Once it was just ship-side leadership, he let the mask slip a little. Not a lot. Enough that I’m not assuming the next alarm is a drill.”

  They turned another corner. The air smelled faintly of oil and ozone: closer to engineering. Tanaka took a left without hesitating, and a few seconds later the armory hatch came into view, heavy and featureless except for the keypad and the armed rating standing beside it.

  Jax nodded once. “Good,” she said. “You can find guns.”

  The rating straightened but relaxed when he saw the squad tags. “Sergeant,” he said.

  “Just walking routes,” Jax told him. “If you see Theta sprinting this way, open the door and don’t ask questions.”

  “Yes, Sergeant.”

  She stepped back, gestured down the hall. “Next,” she said. “Vos. Engineering access to emergency bulkhead controls, section gamma-three. Let’s see if you can find your way without a map.”

  Vos made a face, but he moved.

  As they fell in behind him, Navarro bumped shoulders with Jax. “So Okafor’s nervous, Shenzhou’s jumpy, and we’re doing ship tours,” she said. “Feels like something’s missing from that story.”

  “What’s missing,” Jax said, “is confirmation. Right now all we have is weird. Weird gets you drills, not lockdown.”

  “You think it’s Opp?” Tanaka asked.

  “I think the last time we saw something weirder than usual and decided it probably wasn’t a problem, we got half a task force turned into scrap,” Jax said. “Okafor remembers that. So does Gaunt. So do I.”

  Kaden watched her out of the corner of his eye. Jax didn’t scare easily. She didn’t do big speeches about fear. But there was a tightness at the corner of her mouth that said she’d already run through half a dozen worst-case scenarios and filed them by likelihood.

  “And you?” he asked. “What do you think it is?”

  She shrugged. “Best case? Opp are moving supply or shifting pickets and we’re seeing the bleed-over. Worst case? They’re learning new tricks with Aurora’s edges. Something like a stealth profile or decoy signature.”

  Vos snorted. “So either they’re tidying their backyard or they’re learning how to knock on the door without showing up on cameras,” he said. “Fantastic.”

  “That’s why we walk,” Jax said. “If something gets near this ship without us seeing it coming from ten thousand klicks out, we at least don’t waste time figuring out how to get to where we’re needed.”

  Vos took them down a stairwell that smelled like coolant and metal, then through a short dogleg that ended in a reinforced control alcove. The bulkhead console there bore the hazard-strip outline and the lockout tags that marked it as an emergency bulkhead node.

  He tapped the frame. “Gamma-three bulkhead control,” he said. “Present and accounted for.”

  “Good,” Jax said. “Next time, do it faster, but good.”

  Vos put a hand to his chest. “I live to meet your impossible standards,” he said.

  “I know,” Jax said. “Try not to hurt yourself doing it.”

  They spent the next hour crisscrossing the ship.

  Navarro led them from the mess to a secondary muster node that backed onto a maintenance shaft. Jax quizzed her on why that one instead of the closer, obvious junction; Navarro pointed out the thicker bulkheads and the fact that the shafts gave alternate routes if the main corridor went to hell.

  Tanaka took them from Theta bay to a choke point near one of the hangar access ways, noting where cover was decent and where it wasn’t. Jax made him stand in the middle of the corridor and picture how he’d hold it with just a rifle and his body, no shield.

  Vos chose a path from med to a fire-suppression control nook none of them had known existed, earning a rare, small “nice” from Jax.

  Every few routes, as they paused to catch breath or got waylaid by traffic, someone pushed her for more of Okafor’s briefing.

  “So when Shenzhou tagged the weird signatures,” Navarro said, leaning against a bulkhead near a crew stair, “did they try pinging them harder? See if they’d show their teeth?”

  “They did what they could without yelling ‘we see you’ at whoever’s out there,” Jax said. “Focused sweeps, different angles. Same result. Blips at the edge of range, gone when you look directly at them.”

  “Could be atmospheric interference,” Vos said. “Micrometeoroid junk, radiation, all that stuff we pretend is boring until it fries a sensor.”

  “Could be,” Jax said. “No one’s ruling that out. But Opp have been in this corridor as long as we have. They’ve had the same time with Aurora. If they’ve found a way to sit just outside what we expect to see, I don’t want to be surprised by how fast they move once they step in.”

  Tanaka’s brow furrowed. “You think they’re staging,” he said. “Feeling the edges.”

  “I think,” Jax said slowly, “that we are not the only ones who learn from our mistakes. They saw what happened when they let us form up and hit them on our terms at that torp ship. If I were them, I’d be looking for ways to hit first and hit sideways.”

  Kaden thought about the Reaver they’d torn apart in cramped corridors. About Opp techs in a relay room, armed more with tools than with doctrine.

  “Stealth,” he said quietly. “Or something close.”

  Jax met his eyes. “Maybe,” she said. “Or maybe Shenzhou needs her sensors tuned. Either way, we don’t lose anything by knowing our way around our own home.”

  They moved again.

  By the time Jax finally called a halt, Kaden’s sense of the Valiant felt sharper than it ever had. Hallway markings weren’t just numbers; they were routes. This junction meant a five-minute sprint to Med Two, that ladder meant a straight shot to an armory, that unremarkable door hid a bulkhead control they might need if Opp ever tried to turn a corridor into a killing box.

  Jax checked the time, then glanced at their faces.

  “All right,” she said. “You’re not completely useless without Aurora drawing you pictures. That’s progress.”

  Vos wiped the back of his hand over his forehead. “Is this the part where you tell us it was all a test and we failed anyway?” he asked.

  “No,” Jax said. “This is the part where I tell you Okafor’s going to keep pushing this until he either figures out what’s bothering him or something proves him right. Until then, when he says ‘review muster and defensive positions,’ we don’t argue.”

  Navarro gave her a sideways look. “And what do you think the odds are that he’s just being paranoid?” she asked.

  Jax was quiet for a moment.

  “When Okafor gets twitchy,” she said at last, “it usually means everyone else is about to learn why they should’ve been.”

  That settled over the squad in a way that didn’t need comments.

  She blew out a breath. “You’ve got the rest of the afternoon,” she said. “Liang expects you back in physio on your usual slots. Don’t skip. Hit the range or the gym if you’ve got energy left. And if any of you find yourselves staring at the bulkheads and imagining Opp walking through them, do me a favor and go play cards instead. You’ll get plenty of time to be terrified when it’s actually happening.”

  “Yes, Sergeant,” they said.

  She nodded once, then added, more quietly, “You did good today. Try not to let it go to your heads.”

  Then she turned and headed down the corridor, already, Kaden suspected, on her way to another briefing or another conversation with Okafor about ghosts on Shenzhou’s scopes.