The Kaath-Seven Variant killed the decoy at forty-one seconds, and Marcus did not stop the clock.
The main display painted the failure in clean geometry. The simulated Revenant analogue hung inside the garrison envelope the way the real ship had hung inside the real one, broadcasting captured distress codes toward a depot that should have sent help. The codes failed. The garrison did not come to assist. The garrison came to kill.
Six corvettes instead of three. A destroyer holding the depot’s dark face. The Trojan horse was a corpse before the strike group finished its approach fold.
Twelve junior officers sat in the semicircle. None of them had been in this room for the first class. New cohort. Marcus had built this scenario to break them, because the Vethrak would try harder than any simulation, and a broken officer in a lab cost less than a broken officer in a chair.
Captain Yuki Tanaka sat one station to his right, hands folded, the same stillness she had brought to Hope’s bridge. She had not spoken since the scenario loaded. She did not need to. Her presence was the other half of the room.
Lieutenant So-hyun Jang had the command seat. She was small in the way Academy graduates were small before the first real deployment put weight on them. Her hands were already moving.
“Decoy is burned,” she said. “Garrison is committing to the kill. Destroyer has not moved.”
Good. She was reading the destroyer, not the wreck. Most of them would have stared at the decoy dying.
“Doctrine is withdraw and reassess,” the officer on her left said. “We lost the door. We leave.”
Jang did not leave.
“Decoy, go critical.” Her voice stayed flat. “Full reactor flare. Make it look like a cascade failure. I want every corvette on that wreck.”
Marcus’s left hand tightened on his knee. The latency lived there, a fraction of a second between the thought and the tendon. He did not interrupt.
On the display, the decoy bloomed. Blue-white. Ugly. The signature of a Cascade Reactor losing containment. The six corvettes turned into the flare the way predators turned into a wounded thing. The destroyer held.
“Strike group, fold to the depot’s thermal shadow. Now. Extraction window opens the moment they commit.”
It was the kind of call Marcus would have made at her age. Drive into the thing that wanted to kill you while it was busy killing something else. Use the corpse. Use the heat. Use the fact that the Vethrak treated a dying vessel as inventory to be finished, not as a trap.
It was also the kind of call he had learned to treat with caution. At the real Kaath-Seven, three weeks ago, he had wanted to break formation when the reinforcements dropped. Kira had held the line. She had been right. The marines had needed the perimeter. The extraction had needed the minutes. Aggressive posture would have spent those minutes on a fight that did not have to happen yet.
The simulation did not care what had been right three weeks ago. The simulation cared about the numbers Jang was feeding it.
The strike group dropped into the depot’s shadow. The destroyer’s firing solution lagged by four seconds; the thermal bloom from the decoy had washed its targeting. Jang’s group put lances into the destroyer’s drive cluster before the first return fire landed. The destroyer went dark. The corvettes were still chewing on a wreck that no longer mattered.
“Anchors. Clock is running. I want extraction in six minutes.”
They did not get six. They got seven minutes and eleven seconds, and two simulated ships came back with hull breaches that would have killed people. The depot folded. The garrison was still turning when the strike group left.
The room went quiet in the particular way a room went quiet when nobody had expected to still be on the board.
Marcus stood. Walked to the main display. Twelve faces tracked him. He pulled the engagement timeline and highlighted the moment Jang had ordered the decoy to die.
“Walk me through your decision.”
Jang looked at the highlight, then at him. She did not apologize for the casualties. He liked that more than he should have.
“The IFF was already dead,” she said. “Withdrawing would have given the destroyer a clean sky and the corvettes time to re-form. The decoy was spent. A spent asset that can still make heat is not spent. I used the heat.” She paused. “The destroyer was the problem. The corvettes were hungry. Hungry things go to the loudest dying. I made the dying loud.”
“You spent two ships to buy the window.”
“I spent two hulls the sim said I could lose. I would have spent one if the geometry had given me one.” Her jaw set. “It did not.”
Sound tactical judgment. Different from his. He would have gone earlier. He would have taken the destroyer with the decoy still intact and gambled that the corvettes would hesitate. She had accepted the decoy was already dead and made the death do work. Cleaner. Colder. Better.
“The Vethrak will not always take the bait,” he said.
“Then I will be dead, and someone else will run the next variant.” She said it without drama. “That is why we are here.”
He nodded. “Reset. Same scenario. I want to see if you can do it with one hull.”
They ran it again. They lost. The destroyer fired through the flare on the second pass and caught the strike group still folding in. Jang reset without being told. On the third run she kept the decoy alive for twelve extra seconds, long enough to drag the corvettes ten degrees off their best intercept, and lost only a frigate’s port battery. The depot still folded.
“Better,” Marcus said. “Not good. Better.”
The cohort filed out. Jang last, datapad already open, the way Reyes had left the first class. The comparison arrived without permission. Reyes had learned by failing the obvious thing. Jang had learned by succeeding at the dangerous one. Both would be needed.
Tanaka stood. The injuries had left her gait a fraction more careful than it had been when she commanded Hope. The care was the only tell. Everything else was the same stillness.
“She thinks like you used to,” Tanaka said.
“She thinks like herself. That is better.”
Tanaka’s mouth moved in the small way that was her version of agreement. “You are building officers who will be better than you.”
Marcus looked at the empty stations. The chairs that were not command chairs. The room that was not a bridge. Two officers who would never take a ship into a fight again, standing over a board that still was one.
“That is the point.”
He said it, and he meant it without reservation. The first time since David had sat down in the chair that used to be his. The pride did not arrive as a thought. It arrived as a loosening in his shoulders, a drop in the coiled thing he carried in his hands. His left hand was still slower. The latency was still in the report. None of that was the work anymore.
The work was the next variant.
Tanaka left him to it. He sat. He opened the scenario file and changed the parameters. Next week the destroyer would not hold. Next week the destroyer would fire on the decoy and the strike group in the same breath. Next week the garrison would refuse the bait.
He was not preparing them to survive.
He was preparing them to win.
If you enjoyed this story, you can follow the main story arc in The Exodus Rush, the first book in The Vethrak Requiem series.