Location:Seven Peaks — Technomancer Battalion Barracks, Training Yard
Date/Time:TC1854.08.16, Dawn
Sera Vahn woke at 04:47, thirteen minutes before the alarm she'd never needed.
The barracks were dark. Quiet, the way military quarters got quiet — not the absence of sound but the presence of discipline. Three hundred and twelve people sleeping in shifts, the off-duty cohort breathing with the synchronized rhythm of soldiers who'd learned to rest on command. Boots beneath bunks, aligned to the millimeter. Packs on hooks. Personal effects stored left-to-right, heaviest to lightest, exactly as Federation Regulation 14-C specified for deployable infantry.
Nobody had asked them to do this. Nobody had issued a regulation. They'd been at Seven Peaks for six days, sleeping in barracks that smelled like living wood instead of recycled air, eating food that tasted like food instead of nutritional efficiency paste, and still — the boots were aligned. The packs were on hooks.
