The pulse rifle's weight distribution felt alien in Fiona's hands—front-heavy, the power cell humming with barely contained energy. Around her, the others handled their weapons with the casual familiarity of people born to violence. Yoon's shots carved perfect clusters into the target's center mass. Nakamura's breathing regulated to the rhythm of sustained fire. Even Davis, loose-limbed and seemingly careless, put rounds exactly where he intended.
Fiona's first shot went wide by half a meter.
"You're anticipating the recoil," Sergeant Ashby barked. "Pulse weapons don't kick like chemical propellant guns. Trust the weapon, Vega."
Her second shot veered off in the opposite direction.
A quiet tally began to form behind her eyes: two failures. The number would grow.
The Gauss rifle was worse. The magnetic acceleration created a subsonic whine that seemed to burrow into her bones, and the targeting system's heads-up display overlaid information faster than her untrained eyes could process. Wind speed, target distance, projectile drop compensation—data streams that meant nothing to someone who'd never needed to calculate death at a distance.
Twenty-three shots. Three hits. Each one grazing flesh that wasn't there.
She kept her face blank, but behind her eyes, the number ticked higher. Very little success. Way too much failing. She tried to reason through the data, to find the pattern, but it slipped through her fingers—logic undone by muscle memory she didn't have.
Later, the instructor's voice crackled through her helmet comm: "Remember, Vega, you're a passenger this trip. I handle everything until you signal ready."
Fiona nodded, though her throat felt too tight to speak. Through the aircraft's open door, the training grounds spread below like a child's scale model—buildings reduced to matchboxes, dunes painting the desert infinite.
The instructor's hand found her shoulder. "On my mark. Three… two…"
The fall was a lesson in helplessness. Wind tore at her jumpsuit, gravity claiming her with hungry finality. Her mind, trained by two years of kyokushin to find center in chaos, simply… scattered. The earth rushed up with impossible speed while her inner ear screamed contradictions about up and down.
When the chute deployed, the sudden deceleration folded her forward like a closing book. She hung there, swaying, gasping, while around her the others whooped and hollered like they'd discovered flight itself.
Singh's voice over the radio, breathless with joy: "This is what the birds feel! This is freedom!"
Her stomach buckled. She fumbled with the latch—too slow. The sickness had nowhere to go.
They gave her a day to recover. She spent it staring at the ceiling, counting the cracks, listening to the hollow echo of her own breath. The failures accumulated in the silence, each one settling in her chest like silt.
Then came the pool.
Today the water was chlorinated and cold, the diving gear heavier than she'd anticipated. Thirty meters down, the pressure squeezed her chest while she struggled with the underwater obstacle course—a maze of pipes and barriers designed to simulate the interior of a flooded spacecraft.
Her movements were clumsy, inefficient. Where Yoon glided through the water with shark-like precision, Fiona flailed. Where Montoya powered through obstacles with brute determination, she got tangled in her own air hose.
By the time she surfaced, the others had completed three runs to her one.
She rolled onto her back, letting the water close her eyes. The world went muffled, distant. Only the sum of her failures remained.
The training dummy weighed exactly nighty-five kilograms—the average mass of a fully equipped soldier. Fiona hefted it across her shoulders in a fireman's carry, just like she'd seen Sagar once take people from a burning building, muscles protesting but holding. Her kyokushin training had built strength in her core, taught her to embrace discomfort.
Twenty meters. Her breathing stayed controlled.
Thirty meters. The dummy's weight began to settle into her bones.
Forty meters. Her pace slowed, steps becoming forced rather than fluid.
Fifty meters. Her vision started to tunnel, not from oxygen debt but from the accumulated strain of supporting another human being's full weight while moving at tactical speed.
At sixty meters, she stumbled. At seventy, she went to one knee. At seventy-five, she let the dummy roll off her shoulders and fell beside it, chest heaving, sweat stinging her eyes.
Silence. Not even the instructors spoke. The ground pressed its truth into her breath: humility, not defeat. Her breath was a prayer, ragged and wordless. What am I missing?
Around the course, Yoon was completing her second lap.
Then came the rocket-propelled grenade launcher, which felt like holding a piece of industrial equipment rather than a weapon. Forty-pound weight distributed across an unwieldy frame, the targeting system requiring calculations she didn't instinctively understand—trajectory compensation, range estimation, blast radius assessment.
Her first shot struck the ground twenty meters short of target.
Her second went over by thirty.
The third misfired entirely—operator error, according to the diagnostic.
"Vega," Corporal Crowe's voice carried no anger, just tired resignation. "You're thinking like a civilian. This isn't about strength or willpower. It's about accepting that some tools require understanding you don't have yet."
By the end of the sixth month, the obstacle course combined everything: weapons handling under stress, physical endurance, tactical movement. Fiona moved through it like someone translating a foreign language in real time—each action still requiring conscious thought where it should have been instinct.
Forty percent below standard. Like measuring a drowning swimmer in strokes per second.
Her accuracy scores barely registered.
When she crossed the finish line, the silence from the instructors spoke louder than any reprimand.
There was no scolding, no orders beyond her current training.
The classroom felt different from the training grounds—sterile, academic, removed from the physical failures of the past months. Specialist Irina stood at the front, her expression professional but not unkind.
"Modern military doctrine has evolved," she began, her voice carrying the weight of institutional change. "Combat medics are no longer deployed to forward positions. Medical personnel remain in secured areas, treating casualties after extraction by combat teams."
She gestured to the anatomical charts covering the walls. "However, this campaign profile requires different parameters. You will be operating beyond any possibility of medical evacuation. When someone is wounded, the person next to them becomes their only chance of survival."
Fiona sat straighter, her attention sharpening in a way it hadn't during weapons training. Around her, the others shifted uncomfortably—soldiers trained to inflict damage, now being asked to consider its reversal.
"The question you must ask yourselves," Irina continued, "is not whether you can kill the enemy. It's whether you can save your teammate when the enemy has tried to kill them first."
For the first time in months, Fiona felt the shape of something missing. It pressed at her thoughts, silent and insistent. Not despair—a question, seeded in the ache of her failures. And the answer, if it existed, was somewhere in the silence, in the breath she drew, in the ground that taught her humility. Her strength was not the kind measured in laps or accuracy scores, but in persistence, empathy, perception. In this place, that, too, looked like failure.
But seeds grow in darkness.
The holographic display cast blue light across six faces as Specialist Irina traced arterial pathways with clinical precision. Her stylus moved with the certainty of someone who had long ago surrendered compassion to the calculus of survival, reducing human suffering to algorithms, translating bleeding flesh into manageable data points.
"Triage is mathematics," she intoned, her voice the flat edge of doctrine. "Green tags walk themselves to safety. Yellow tags can wait thirty minutes for treatment. Red tags require immediate intervention." The hologram shifted, silhouettes blooming with color—green, yellow, red, black. "Black tags are beyond help. Do not waste time on black tags or reds if you're still in combat."
She turned back to the display, stylus dancing through projected anatomy. "Pressure to the artery. Then foam. Then stabilization. Five minutes is the golden window. After that, probability of survival drops to twelve percent. Move to the next casualty or resume combat."
The mathematics of abandonment, rendered in cool blue light. A mercy by subtraction.
Fiona shifted in her seat. Something ancient and unyielding stirred in her chest—it wasn't rebellion, but the slow, tectonic refusal of a mother's heart to accept the arithmetic of loss. She felt it coil inside her, a question that had waited for its hour. She looked at Davis, at the scar on his cheek, at the way he chewed his protein bar as if it were penance. Every soldier had a face behind the question.
"I'm sorry, Specialist Irina…"
"Questions later, Vega." Irina didn't look up, her stylus sketching pressure points with mechanical grace.
But Fiona's voice, when it came, was a whisper that thundered through the blue-lit silence. Not an accusation—a prayer for the living, a summons for the dead. "Who saves the ones left behind on the battlefield?"
The stylus stilled. A tremor, so slight it might have been imagined, ran through Irina's hand. The hologram flickered, casting stuttering shadows across the room.
"That's not part of the current mission protocol," Irina said, still facing the screen. But her voice had changed, the iron of certainty gone brittle.
Fiona's gaze moved from Davis to Yoon, to Singh's closed eyes, to Nakamura's restless hands. "But the dead don't follow protocol. And neither do the abandoned."
The silence that followed was not empty. It was the hush before a storm, the moment a cathedral holds its breath before the first note of requiem. Yoon's composure fractured, just enough to show the wound beneath. Davis' jaw froze mid-bite. Singh's eyes closed again as if bracing for an old ache. Nakamura's fingers curled, seeking something to hold. Montoya's swagger slipped away, leaving him raw and young.
Irina's face, when she turned, was a mask carved by memory. "That question hasn't been asked in two centuries." Her eyes were deep wells, reflecting distant battlefields and friends who had become numbers.
"Maybe it should have been," Fiona said, her words falling like stones in water.
The accusation was not against Irina, but the system that had calcified around the acceptable calculation of loss—a system that trained killers with precision but never taught anyone to save with equal devotion.
Irina's fingers tightened around the stylus. Not shaking. Not yet. But the weight of every black tag she'd ever written pressed down, making her hand falter. Her throat worked, and when she spoke, her voice was a thread unraveling.
"In the Suez campaigns, we lost sixty percent casualties in the first wave. Protocol was medical evac to cleared LZs. But the ships couldn't reach the forward positions. So we… we left them. We had to leave them."
The hologram flickered, blue shadows crawling across her face.
"I was a field medic then. Before the reforms. Before efficiency became gospel. I carried a sidearm and a trauma kit. I went where the shooting was. I used to bring people home."
Yoon's voice broke the silence, soft and stunned. "How many?"
Irina's laugh was hollow, a sound scraped from the bottom of an empty well. "Forty-seven confirmed saves. Eighteen months of combat. Forty-seven who would be black tags now."
She gestured to the suspended silhouettes. "The mathematics are clean now. Efficient. No wasted resources. No medics dying in futile rescue. We optimized rescue until we stopped performing it. And no one—not a general, not a medic, not even me—asked why that felt like mercy."
Davis placed his protein bar down, as if afraid the moment might shatter.
"So what happened?" he asked, voice barely more than breath. "Why did they change it?"
Irina's eyes dropped to the floor, her voice growing smaller with each word. "Because forty-seven saves required one hundred and thirty-two attempts. Because I lost eight medics trying to reach the unreachable. Because the mathematics of sacrifice didn't balance against those of loss. Because someone decided that accepting certain death was more efficient than risking uncertain rescue."
Fiona leaned forward, the mother in her rising, fierce and unyielding. "But those forty-seven had families. Had mothers waiting."
"Yes." The confession was a wound reopened. "They did."
"Then the mathematics are wrong," Fiona said, her voice the quiet certainty of truth. "The ones giving the orders are wrong."
The silence that followed was a held breath, as if the room itself waited to see if doctrine could withstand the weight of one woman's refusal to accept that anyone was expendable. Fiona felt the eyes of the others on her—saw in them the faces of those they'd left behind, the ghosts that haunted every soldier's sleep. Fiona's gauntlet flared and gave a full rotation of the compass.
Irina looked at her, something like wonder flickering in her eyes. "You're not asking about protocol, are you? You're asking about purpose."
Fiona nodded, her gaze steady. "I'm asking what happens when the only person who can save your child is the one next to them in the foxhole. Whether we're training them to try, or teaching them to walk away."
The hologram died, plunging the room into harsh, ordinary light. Without the blue glow, everything was more real, more raw.
Irina's voice, when it came, was soft but unbreakable. "The question you're really asking is whether we're still soldiers, or if we've become something else—something that counts losses instead of preventing them."
Around the room, five faces stared back, the weight of unasked questions settling on their shoulders.
"So," Fiona said, her voice a wonder and a challenge, "who's going to teach me to save people instead of just… processing them?"
Irina's smile was sad and sharp as a blade. "I suppose I can."
The next morning, Fiona found a tube of cream for her blisters on her bunk. No words. Just respect, quietly given. Singh helped Montoya drag a wounded dummy from the mud. Yoon lingered at the pool's edge, offering a hand without comment. No one walked past a fallen comrade—real or simulated—without trying to lift them.
A new mathematics was being written, one imperfect rescue at a time. And Fiona, no longer just an outsider, had become the axis around which the team began to turn.
The next morning came as all the others had—bitter, bright, and indifferent. The sun's light was a scalpel, slicing the camp into harsh truths and harder shadows.
Fiona still failed.
Her shots scattered, her throws fell short. Her dive was cleaner than yesterday's, but she surfaced last, lungs burning with the cold. The fireman's carry ended at sixty meters, knees buckling, the weight of the dummy pressing her into the dirt.
But when she stood—breathless, braced against the cold earth—they were waiting.
Not the instructors.
The others.
Yoon's hand found hers, not in pity but in patience—a quiet contract between equals. Singh nodded and took the dummy from her shoulders, wordless. Davis slid a protein bar across the bench, no comment, just a gesture. Montoya cracked a joke that vanished into the morning, but left a warmth behind. Nakamura's silence was a shelter, a shared burden.
At lunch, no one touched their food until Fiona sat. No words—just the unspoken ritual of belonging. She failed again, and they made space for her anyway.
In the medical bay, Irina had discarded the color-coded tags. Her diagrams now spoke only of veins, muscles, tools—of reclamation, not surrender.
"We're not counting dead men anymore," she told them. "We're learning to steal them back from death itself."
And for the first time, the squad listened—not as students, but as inheritors of a new creed.
That evening, the mess hall buzzed with exhaustion and the clatter of trays. But among them, Fiona felt something shift—a quiet warmth, the way soldiers sit when they've stopped being strangers. The way families eat when nothing is left to prove.
Then came the voice.
"Vega."
Sergeant Ashby stood in the doorway, his silhouette carved from stone and memory. The room froze, eyes flicking between Fiona and the sergeant.
"Mess hall closes in twenty," Davis tried, a feeble shield.
"Vega doesn't need twenty," Ashby said, voice flat. "She's due for her private evening instruction."
Groans, a muttered "Poor girl," but Fiona stood. This time, she didn't shrink beneath the weight of his stare.
They walked the corridors in silence: echoing drills, humming lights, the metallic breath of the compound. As they neared the Yard, Fiona paused. She saw Ashby's hand, almost unconsciously, running over a bundle of old dog tags—names stamped into steel, edges worn smooth by years of touch. He kept them hidden in his pocket, tending to them with a reverence that was almost prayer. The names of those left behind. A silent act of rebellion, buried in duty.
Fiona understood, then. Ashby was not just a warden of the system—he was a man bruised by it, punished for still believing in the value of one soul.
She stopped at the corner, gathering herself. "I don't want to run laps tonight," she said, softly.
Ashby arched an eyebrow. "Oh? Planning to negotiate your punishments now?"
"I'm not asking to skip them." Her voice was not defiant, not afraid—something older, something forged in the long dark of disappointment. "I'm asking you to change the lesson."
He said nothing. She pressed on, as if she were laying out an equation:
"The doctrine fails because it assumes efficiency is the same as survival. It's not. It counts the living and the dead, but it never measures the space in between—the seconds when a hand reaches out, the difference a single act of care can make. It's a system that forgets what it means to be saved, or to save."
She looked him in the eye, logic burning alongside love. "I want to carry a wounded soldier off a battlefield. Not just in theory—not someday—now. I want to learn how to keep someone alive with no evac, how to move fast while bleeding, how to lift eighty-five kilos through mud and artillery, how to be the reason someone else survives."
Her hands shook, her eyes became moist. The kind of conviction that kneels beside broken bodies and lifts, even when the world says leave them.
"I don't want to fight just to survive. I want to fight to save."
Ashby studied her, face unreadable. The silence was a duel of souls—her hope against the world's judgment. Fiona stood unarmed before the greatest blade: the indifference of the system. But she did not flinch.
A shift, then. Barely perceptible. The faintest softening in Ashby's eyes, as if he remembered a time when he, too, had believed one life could be worth the world.
"Meet me at the Yard," he said, voice low. "No harness. No pacing. Bring two dummies."
"Two?"
"If you're going to save lives in no man's land," he said, "you better be ready to do it when your legs are already giving out."
He turned, walking into the dark.
Fiona lingered. She looked down at her hands—calloused, clumsy, but hers. She looked at her shadow, stretched across the corridor, and saw not a failure, but a beginning.
She stepped into the Yard. Tonight, the dome was open, the sky a black ocean scattered with stars. Somewhere overhead, a satellite traced its silent arc—a promise, a memory, a future.
Fiona looked up, heart aching with hope and history. She thought of Camilla, almost at her dream job, already charting her own course. She wanted Camilla to know: the broken, weak woman she had been was gone. In her place stood someone who chose meaning, even in a world that measured only efficiency.
Somewhere out there is a future where no one is left behind, and you live happily ever after.
Maybe it starts here.
Or maybe it started the first time I saw your smile.
She squared her shoulders and walked into the night, ready to carry the weight of another soul—no matter how far, no matter how heavy.
And above her, the stars watched, silent and infinite, as if waiting to see what one act of defiance might change.