The mess hall felt cavernous now. Six trays where there had been nine. Six trays instead of nine. Six voices replacing the nervous bravado that once echoed through the hall. The absence hung in the air like smoke—thick, acrid, impossible to ignore.
Fiona slid into her seat beside Yoon, who had said nothing since they'd returned from the communications room. The Korean woman's eyes were red-rimmed but dry, her posture rigid as cathedral stone. Across the table, Nakamura stirred his tray absently, like his thoughts were a thousand miles away—maybe back home, maybe on his father's face.
Davis sat hunched over his tray, shoulders curved inward as if trying to make himself smaller. The easy confidence that had carried him through the first week was gone, replaced by something rawer—the expression of a man who had spent his entire life being measured against an impossible standard and had finally found a measuring stick that made his brother's achievements seem quaint.
"They couldn't handle it," Montoya said quietly. "The other three, just... left."
Singh nodded slowly, his dark eyes reflecting depths that seemed older than his years. "Perhaps they were the wise ones. Perhaps we are the fools, staying to fight gods we cannot comprehend."
"No." Yoon's voice cut through the subdued conversation like a blade. "They were cowards. We are the ones who understand what it means to have nothing left to lose."
Fiona looked around the table, seeing each of them with new clarity. Not soldiers, survivors. People who had been discarded, overlooked, deemed insufficient by the very world they were now being asked to protect.
The irony was not lost on her. Sky started this entire program choosing Earth's rejects to stand against the Old Gods. She still couldn't decide if Sky had chosen right—or if they were just the last people dumb enough to still be standing.
Sergeant Ashby's voice crackled through the overhead speakers, interrupting her thoughts.
"All remaining personnel to Conditioning Bay Seven. Physical assessment begins in ten minutes. Failure to appear or pass, will result in my private, one-of-a-kind training in the yard instead of sleeping tonight."
The words hung in the air like a challenge. Or a threat.
They rose in unison, trays clattering into the recycling slots with the efficiency of people who had learned to waste nothing—not time, not motion, not opportunity.
"Conditioning Bay Seven was a cathedral of suffering disguised as a training facility. The centrifuge loomed at its heart, a monstrous arm poised to hurl its captive into oblivion, its metal skin gleaming under the cold fluorescence like the bones of some ancient, mechanical leviathan. The air shimmered with ozone and the low, relentless hum of machines—an undercurrent of anticipation that prickled the skin and set teeth on edge.
Specialist Irina stood sentinel beside the centrifuge, her posture rigid, eyes flicking over her tablet with the clinical detachment of a surgeon. Yet, in the set of her mouth, there was a flicker of empathy, the silent recognition of the ordeal about to unfold. She spoke, her voice slicing through the tension: "This is not a test you can study for. Your bodies will either adapt to the stresses of high-G acceleration, or they will not. Your minds will either maintain consciousness under forces that crush rational thought, or they will not." Her hand, steady but reverent, gestured to the centrifuge as if invoking a sacred rite.
Corporal Crowe's massive silhouette emerged, his hands curled into loose fists, knuckles white. He addressed the recruits with the gravity of one who had survived cosmic trials himself, his words heavy: "Standard astronaut training builds up to nine Gs over months of conditioning. You have three weeks to reach twelve. The Streagrian ships require fifteen for optimal performance." Twelve Gs. Three weeks. The arithmetic of the impossible settled over the group.
Nakamura approached first, his steps measured, hands flexing at his sides. His jaw clenched, but his eyes shone with a quiet, almost desperate relief—a man at last facing a foe he could name. As the centrifuge spun him into darkness, his features contorted, sweat beading on his brow, lips drawn back in a silent snarl of defiance. When he stumbled out, his legs buckling, he grinned—satisfaction flickering in his gaze. He had not failed. Not completely.
Davis followed, rolling his shoulders, exhaling slowly. He settled into the machine with the languid grace of a man used to shadows, his fingers drumming a silent rhythm on the restraints. As the G-forces mounted, his breathing deepened, eyes half-lidded, surrendering to the storm rather than resisting it. At ten Gs, a slow smile crept across his lips—a private triumph, a moment of revelation of his own hidden strength.
Singh's hands trembled as he mounted the platform, but his eyes closed in meditation. Each breath was a prayer, each heartbeat a drumbeat against the encroaching dark. Montoya, jaw set, fists clenched, met the challenge with brute stubbornness, his body rigid, veins standing out on his neck as he refused to yield.
Yoon's approach was a study in mechanical precision—shoulders squared, gaze fixed ahead, betraying nothing. As the centrifuge spun, her fingers curled around the armrests, knuckles pale but steady. Her brain activity spiked, not with panic but with a strange, luminous focus. At fifteen Gs, she emerged unscathed, her voice flat: "Satisfactory." The others exchanged glances, awed and unsettled by her inhuman resilience.
Then Fiona.
She stepped forward like someone about to confess—every part of her braced for judgment. Her hands trembled as she gripped the restraints, knuckles bloodless. The air tasted of metal and antiseptic, sharp on her tongue. Her breath came shallow, chest tight, as she forced the words out: "Vega, Fiona. Ready for assessment." The syllables felt foreign, brittle, as if they might shatter in her mouth.
As the machine spun, the world narrowed—the roar of the centrifuge, the crush of the harness, the hot sting of tears she refused to shed. The G-forces pressed her down, but it was the weight of memory that truly suffocated her: her daughter's disappointed eyes, the echo of slammed doors, the cold certainty of never being enough. At three Gs, her vision tunneled; at four, her breath rasped, hands clawing at the restraints. At five, the darkness surged—not the merciful black of unconsciousness, but the familiar void of failure. Her lips parted, a silent plea lost in the storm: Let me be more than this.
She awoke to the antiseptic glare of the medbay, Irina's face looming above, her voice a distant echo. "The loss of consciousness was not due to physical limitations but psychological factors. Stress response triggered premature shutdown of conscious faculties." Around her, the others' voices blurred—talk of training, improvement, advancement.
Fiona stared at the ceiling, the taste of failure bitter on her tongue. But beneath the shame, something new flickered. The realization that she had dared to reach for the impossible, to test the boundaries of her own endurance. For the first time, failure felt less like an end and more like a beginning—a chance to go beyond her limits, even when falling short. She closed her eyes, a faint, defiant smile ghosting her lips. The iceberg of her struggle lay hidden, vast beneath the surface, but above, a single thought broke through: I am still here.
The mess hall felt different now. Not emptier for they had grown accustomed to the absence of voices, the phantom weight of missing trays. But heavier somehow, as if the air itself had thickened with the gravity of what they now understood about their purpose.
Fiona entered to find the others already seated, their movements mechanical, soldiers going through the motions of normalcy while their minds still grappled with cosmic impossibilities. The fluorescent panels cast the same harsh light as always, but even that seemed changed, as if every photon now carried the weight of distant stars and dying civilizations.
She took her seat beside Yoon, who acknowledged her presence with the slightest nod—not friendship, exactly, but recognition at least. The kind shared between people who had seen each other stripped of pretense and found something worth respecting in the debris.
The silence stretched like a held breath, six of them eating protein paste, each grappling with the reality of being humanity's first—and possibly last—gambit.
It was Montoya who finally broke.
"So..." he said, setting down his spoon with exaggerated casualness. "Anyone else wondering if our life insurance policies cover 'death by cosmic horror'?"
The joke landed with the hollow thud of forced levity. Davis managed a weak smile. Nakamura continued eating with methodical precision. Singh stared into his tray as if divining the future from nutrient paste. Yoon's expression remained carved from stone.
Fiona felt the old weight of outsiderhood stir again… and fade slightly when Yoon didn't move away. She wanted to contribute something, to bridge the gap between military camaraderie and her own hard-won understanding of survival, but the words felt clumsy in her mouth before she could speak them.
Montoya seemed to sense the failure of his first attempt. His eyes darted around the table, measuring the depth of the silence he had failed to fill.
"Okay, that was terrible," he admitted, running a hand through his hair. "Let me try again. Wanna hear a construction joke?"
They continued eating, but there was a subtle shift in attention. Even Yoon's mechanical chewing slowed fractionally. The promise of humor, however forced, was better than the weight of contemplating their mortality against impossible odds.
Montoya let the pause stretch, building expectation with the timing of someone who understood that comedy was often about the spaces between words as much as the words themselves.
"I-I'm still working on it," he said finally, his tone carrying just the right note of disappointed resignation.
The laughter began with Davis—a surprised bark that he tried to suppress but couldn't quite manage. It spread to Nakamura, whose rigid composure cracked into something approaching genuine amusement. Even Singh's perpetual solemnity softened into a reluctant smile.
And then, impossibly, Yoon laughed.
Not the polite acknowledgment of a superior's attempt at humor, not the forced camaraderie of military social obligation, but real laughter—brief, unguarded, human. The sound was so unexpected that it seemed to surprise even her, as if she had momentarily forgotten the weight she carried and rediscovered something she thought had been buried with her mother's disappearance.
The moment stretched between them, fragile as spun glass.
"Construction jokes," Nakamura said quietly, shaking his head. "That's what it takes to break the existential dread of confronting cosmic entities older than our species."
"Hey," Montoya replied, his grin carrying genuine warmth now. "Sometimes the universe needs a little structural humor. You know, to keep everything from collapsing."
Singh groaned theatrically. "That was somehow worse than the first one."
"I'm on a roll," Montoya continued, emboldened by the response. "Or should I say, I'm building up to something?"
"Please stop," Davis said, but he was smiling as he said it.
Fiona found herself laughing too, not just at the jokes but at the absurdity of the entire situation. Here they were, Earth's unlikely champions, bonding over construction puns while preparing to become humanity's voice among the stars.
The laughter faded gradually, but it left something behind—not optimism as we know it, but a kind of stubborn warmth. The recognition that even in the face of impossible odds, human beings found ways to assert their humanity.
The barracks dimmed to their usual low-spectrum blue, the signal for lights-out. Boots clunked less now, replaced by the shuffling of tired limbs and the soft hiss of antiseptic linen. The squad crawled into their bunks one by one, each carrying the day's weight like an invisible rucksack strapped to their chests.
Someone—probably Montoya—muttered just loud enough to be overheard, "Fifty says the civvie cracks by week's end."
Davis snorted. "You mean Vega? She already passed her expiration date. She just hasn't figured it out."
"She's still here though," Singh murmured. "Which makes her more persistent than three people who wore stripes."
Yoon didn't join in. She was already half-wrapped in her blanket, eyes open, staring at the ceiling like it had answers.
Fiona heard it all. Didn't respond. Just turned over and stared at her gauntlet glowing faintly beneath the sheets.
She waited until the soft rhythm of regulated breaths filled the space. Then slowly, silently, slipped out of bed.
The corridor was cold—colder than usual. The kind of chill that didn't come from air conditioning but from exhaustion bleeding into bone. Fiona's legs ached. Her eyes burned. But something gnawed at her more than fatigue.
Yoon was missing again.
The same instinct that had once helped her find wounded dogs in back alleys and Camilla in crowded fruit markets guided her now. She walked past the closed rec room, past the darkened lecture bays, until she saw the flicker of light from the comms room—thin and uneven, like a candle trapped in a machine.
She stepped quietly to the edge.
Inside, Yoon stood in front of the console again, face lit in stark grayscale by the interface. Her shoulders were tense, her jaw locked, her eyes locked on a screen flashing:
CLEARANCE LEVEL EXCEEDED – ACCESS DENIED
Yoon's fingers hovered above the keyboard again, unsure.
"You're going to hurt your wrists like that," Fiona whispered.
Yoon didn't turn. "This system's supposed to transmit galactic-wide, but I can't even get it to call a hospital on Earth."
"I thought you might be here," Fiona said gently. "I brought you a protein bar. The cinnamon one."
Silence.
Then a breath. "Put it on the table."
Fiona did.
Yoon pressed her palm to the panel again, trying another override. But this time, the console flickered—not red, not locked out, but… curious. A file directory appeared. Not one she had called.
Fiona stepped forward slowly. The screen displayed a blinking header:
CLASSIFIED: Caelestis Orbital Interceptor Program – Prototype Sentinel-7 AI Performance Log
The room stilled.
As the file expanded, lines of technical data and field logs filled the screen. G-force tolerances. Quantum containment lattice diagnostics. And then—
AI DESIGNATION: SENTINEL-7 — Status: Active but refuses to follow commands.
Notes: Full combat capability. Mach 25 achieved in unmanned mode. Psychological field feedback minimized.
Fiona read it and froze.
Sentinel-7: built for battle, precision, control. A mind forged to command velocity and violence.
She remembered Dision.
Her Dision.
A pirated AI once programmed to greet customers at a tech mall. He wasn't military. He didn't have a stable code. He spoke like a corsair out of an old movie—gravelly, dramatic, half-joking even when explaining quantum field theory. Fiona had never been "Private" or "Operator" to him. She'd been lass, Fiona, sometimes even first mate when they debugged broken raid mechanics together or turned cybercafé machines into stardust-rendering beasts.
He'd taught her math when she needed it. Physics when no one else had time. Logic through metaphors pulled from anime, pirate legends, and classical tales stored in his black-market archive.
Sentinel-7 was born for war. Dision was born by accident—and chose friendship, not combat.
She touched the screen. The terminal hummed. For a moment, the system flickered—was it interference? Or something older?
Yoon whispered, "What is this place?"
Fiona didn't answer. Her throat ached with everything she hadn't said.
Behind them, the door clicked shut.
Fiona turned.
A tall silhouette stood in the frame, arms crossed, face unreadable under the soft orange halo of the corridor light.
Captain Zara.
Her voice, when it came, was cool steel:
"Step away from the terminal."