Chương 60: 25.Heavy Armored CQB 25-4

The second half of the session went straight into practical work. Not solo. Paired coordination. The simulated breach corridor behind the equipment room was running in rotation mode today: low gravity, narrow hull, partial simulated pressure loss, heat interference. The whole corridor was like a length of steel intestine that had been deliberately designed to be unpleasant.

The wall lights changed, some hatches were real and some were false, some could be pried, some needed charges, and some—if you read them wrong—would have the whole group standing with you in the incident review. The instructor stood at the front, flipping through the group assignment board. I had a very bad feeling. In the Federation, that kind of feeling generally isn't intuition. It's environmental feedback. Sure enough, the next second:"Barkley. Hoshino. One group." I looked up. D looked up. Then he smiled.

Not the large, asking-for-it grin—something closer to oh, this combination has potential. My internal response was one sentence: Wonderful. Now it's not just the door that's going to get breached—my peaceful afternoon is going in with it. Jess stood beside me wearing an expression of complete non-responsibility.

"Congratulations. You drew the heavy assault grand prize."

"If you're willing to take my place right now, I'll cut three days off your verbal abuse quota."

"No. I'd like to live a while longer." Reasonable. The instructor called us forward and distributed equipment. D's loadout was no surprise: polarized tower shield, short sidearm, door ram as backup option. I was assigned to the light breach entry configuration: pressure pry bar, short blade, magnetic anchor line, cold-cut blade, and a training pistol so small it barely qualified as a sincere gesture.

The instructor looked at the two of us like he was assessing a combination of one very heavy thing and one very prone-to-improvising thing.

"Your objective isn't to move fastest," he said.

"It's to open the first door, take the first corner, secure the second node, and have both of you come back alive." He tapped the projection diagram.

"Barkley handles forward pressure and cover. Hoshino handles door type assessment, tool selection, and managing false nodes. One of you pushes too far forward. The other makes too many independent calls. I'm not here to fix personalities—I'm here to see if these two problems can produce a function together." I stood there and found the assessment entirely fair. Fair enough to be faintly uncomfortable. D set the shield down with a thud.

"Understood, Instructor." I said: "Understood." Though internally I added: producing a function is possible—producing an incident probably isn't hard either. Before the practical started, D looked down at me. It genuinely has to be said: talking to someone two meters tall is hard on the neck.

"You take my left rear," he said.

"I push the shield right on the corner, you check the door gap from the left." I raised an eyebrow.

"Didn't you used to prefer swallowing the whole corridor?" He pulled one corner of his mouth up.

"Got yelled at for that yesterday."

"Did it help?"

"Somewhat." He grinned.

"At least now I know there's more behind a door than the door." …Right. This person was actually capable of growth. I tested the pry bar in my hand. Not heavy, tip cold and hard, grip with rough anti-slip texturing—clearly made for people who hadn't had time to be afraid yet in a depressurized zone.

"One more thing," I said. D looked at me.

"If you want to take an extra step again, tell me first." He blinked.

"Why?"

"Because I need to know whether I should follow you in, or start drafting your epitaph." D stared at me for a second, then the white teeth appeared again.

"Your mouth is genuinely lethal."

"You're welcome. It's how I've stayed alive." The corridor lights turned red. The instructor called from outside.

"Simulated breach, ready—go!" D raised the shield and compressed his whole body behind it. This time I was right behind him, close enough to hear the impact of every step—armored boot against floor, that deep resonance. Not just weight. A specific, physical forward pressure. Standing behind him, you understood why heavy operators matter to a unit: because the world actually does get pushed forward by them. The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

The first hatch was a standard hull door. One look and I said: "Don't ram it. The right-side lock point is a decoy—the real catch is on the lower edge. Give me three seconds with the pry bar." D didn't argue. He pressed the shield up to cover my line. Good. Smoother than I'd expected. I crouched, fit the pry bar into the lower edge gap, applied pressure, and heard the catch release with a clean snap.

"Open." D kicked the door inward. Rough. But effective. As we cut into the first corridor segment, a false heat signature lit up in the upper right corner. D's body visibly wanted to angle toward it. I spoke immediately:"Don't take it. False marker." He stopped. Actually stopped. I almost didn't react fast enough to the fact. So this wall wasn't completely unable to listen. It just hadn't previously encountered anything worth listening to. Past the first corner, a second door appeared—a maintenance bulkhead.

Couldn't be rammed; ram it and the whole section would lock down. The corridor was slowly rotating, gravity coming and going in waves, and the HUD had two interference red markers blinking on it, as if the system itself wanted to watch us fail. I pressed to the door edge and ran my fingers along the frame. I frowned.

"Lock point is a magnetic return clasp." D stood behind me, shield angled half-oblique, covering the entire line.

"Meaning?"

"Meaning that fist-sized brain of yours can't help by ramming this one." He made a low sound behind me that was almost a laugh.

"Then move faster." I clipped the magnetic anchor line to the side frame, used the cold-cut blade to open the outer panel, hands steady, mood acceptable. Compared to clean answers, at least this kind of thing didn't pretend to have principles. It was just a door. Either it opened or it didn't. Get it right and it gave you a path; get it wrong and it made you look worse. The door was halfway loose when a thin mist began filtering in from the upper left of the corridor. The HUD immediately triggered a warning.

Thermosensitive vapor material—simulated release. Heat weapons prohibited. I swore internally. The Federation's consideration is truly touching: class ends, pop quiz begins immediately. D saw it too. His voice dropped slightly.

"Still opening it?"

"Yes," I said.

"What's the alternative—stay here and develop a relationship with the fog?" I widened the gap enough for D to wedge the shield in. He pushed forward, and the whole door panel finally gave way. But at that exact moment, a simulated enemy marker popped out from behind the second node—positioned precisely in the dead angle outside D's shield edge. D's right hand moved on instinct, reaching for his heat weapon mount. I brought my hand down flat on his forearm.

"You open that heat source and I'll kill you myself." His hand stopped. Not because I was strong enough to stop him. Because he actually heard it. The next second, I slipped out from the left side of his shield shadow, short blade reverse-gripped, and went straight in along the door edge. The enemy marker hadn't fully deployed; I jammed the pry bar against its lower support bracket, then cut through the sensor strip with the blade. The system indicator turned green. Enemy marker suppressed.

I let out a breath and turned to look at D.

"See that? Use the knife." He was watching me from behind the shield with the expression of someone who'd just witnessed a small, supposedly fragile animal dismantle a trap and bite the handler on the way out.

"…You really did grow up with a knife in your mouth, didn't you."

"Thanks. I had an excellent upbringing." Taking the second node was the easy part. Getting out was worse. D was big, the shield was heavy, and the corridor was still turning — we had to compress back through it in reverse. The most common mistake people make at that point is letting the mission completion hit them half a second too early, exhaling just enough to go soft, and then dying on the way back. I hate that particular joke. So I watched D's feet the entire way.

"Half a step back."

"I know."

"Pull your right shoulder in — you're about to take the wall with you."

"I know."

"Stop eating the door gap with your back." That one got a response: "You could also give fewer orders. Instructor's outside. You keep this up and I'll start thinking you're angling for a promotion." … Right. The big bastard had developed a comeback reflex. When we came out of the simulation corridor, the instructor was looking at the timing board. The full score came up. Not first. But high. More importantly, the whole sequence had run almost clean. First door opened neat.

Second node handled correctly inside the vapor simulation. D hadn't overrun his mark. I hadn't walked myself into the dead angle in front of the shield. For two people who'd met yesterday and were running their first real joint op today, the survival margin was already well outside what the Federation usually budgets for new intake. The instructor looked at the record without speaking. That was worse than being yelled at. It meant he was calculating exactly what category of useful you fell into.

Finally he looked up — D first, then me.

"Barkley. You had a brain today." D grinned.

"Thank you, sir."

"Don't get comfortable." The instructor turned to me.

"Hoshino. You didn't charge blind today." I nodded.

"I can run it by the book when I feel like it."

"Ease off the self-congratulation." He said, "The problem with your pair isn't that you can't open doors. It's that once the door's open, neither of you is particularly willing to hand over the reins." That landed dead center. Dead like someone had taken a ruler to the most unlikeable part of my temperament and measured it out loud. D was standing beside me and for once didn't immediately fill the silence. Because he knew it wasn't only aimed at me. The instructor knocked the board twice.

"But you did manage one thing today — you didn't treat each other as expendable. Around here, that counts for something." I was quiet for a second. I don't know why, but that hit harder than a compliment would have. Probably because in a place like the Federation, not treating each other as expendable isn't the factory default. After dismissal, D unstrapped the shield and stood there like a wall that had just finished a long shift at a demolition site, still radiating heat. He looked at me.

"That thing you did back there. Thanks."

"Which thing?"

"Hitting my hand." He said, "Otherwise I might've actually pressed it." I thought about it for a moment.

"Don't mention it. If you had, I'd have been blown up right alongside you. Very dignified." D laughed out loud.

"Alright, so mutual survival." I handed the pry bar back to the equipment rack and turned to look at him.

"You improved today." He raised an eyebrow.

"That's it?"

"Yeah." I said, "Yesterday you were a transport truck with a death wish pointed at the whole world. Today you at least started reading the road signs." He stared at me for two seconds, then laughed again.

"You've got a genuinely fucked up way of complimenting people."

"Right back at you." Jess drifted over from somewhere behind us, clutching an energy bar she'd materialized from God knows where.

"I hereby declare," she announced, "that the most terrifying thing today was not the simulated vapor explosive." I didn't turn around.

"What was it?"

"The fact that you two actually pulled it off." She stuffed the bar into her mouth, voice coming out reverent around the crumbs.

"Sometimes the Federation really does manufacture miracles." I glanced at her.

"You're more bearable when your mouth is full."

"Shut up." D laughed beside us like thunder deciding to do one more lap. I looked at the giant shield leaning against the rack, and for a moment I thought — this chaotic wreck of a team was starting to resemble something. Jess knew where the seams were. Harvey knew how to patch them. Akari knew how to hit the mark. Aida knew what the right answer was supposed to look like. Evelyn knew when the system was lying. And D knew how to make a wall admit it was actually a door. As for me.

I was probably the miserable bastard who knew — in that exact sliver of a moment when a door is almost open but not quite, when the gap is still narrow enough to crush someone — which person to shove in which direction. Today's results: One: First official joint operation with D. Two: Confirmed he doesn't just ram doors — he's starting to learn to stop. That's worth more than the ramming.

Three: Successfully prevented one large heavily-armored idiot from turning the entire team into instructional material inside the vapor simulation zone. Four: The Federation once again demonstrated its fondness for three minutes of class followed by an immediate pop quiz. Five: The team is no longer just physically thick. It's starting to have — barely, grudgingly, but genuinely — something that resembles coordination. The filthiest thing about boarding actions isn't that you have to go into the enemy's ship.

It's that once you're in, you figure it out fast: The door is only the first problem. The real trouble has always been who you end up going through it with. And unfortunately, I was starting to have a pretty good idea of the answer.