Kuiper Squad

The shuttle’s clamps released with a shudder Flo felt in her teeth, and then she was floating.

Out of the shuttle and into Scotty’s Dilemma and the chaos of its hanger. Next stop: The Kuiper Belt.

She’d read the specs. A repurposed mining vessel, converted to troop transport eleven months ago when the shipyards realized they didn’t have enough hulls and didn’t have enough time. The bones of the thing still showed. The support struts too thick for a passenger ship. Conduit runs exposed where someone hadn’t bothered to panel them over. Somewhere in the guts, mining drones nobody had gotten around to stripping out still sat in their berths, waiting for rock that would never come.

She caught a handhold without looking for it, muscle memory doing the work her eyes didn’t need to. Around her, the shuttle’s other passengers were not doing the same.

A kid, nineteen, maybe twenty, fresh in his fatigue’s duffel-carrying posture, drifted past her sideways, arms wheeling, mouth open in a small round shape of pure animal alarm. He hit the wall with his shoulder and rebounded, slower this time, and grabbed at nothing. Behind him, a woman was retching into her own hand, trying to keep it contained and failing. The smell of it was already spreading, thin and sour, catching in the recycled air.

Flo didn’t watch. She’d seen it before. First zero-g always went one of two ways, you either found your body’s new grammar in about four seconds, or you fought it for a week and lost every round.

Her HUD painted a soft blue line along the corridor wall, arcing toward the crew section, adjusting in real time as bodies crossed through it. She followed the line and didn’t correct for the boy who caromed off her hip, didn’t slow for the sergeant near the junction bellowing instructions that nobody was hearing over their own nausea. She’d learned a long time ago that you moved with intention or you got swallowed by the current. There was no room here for anything in between.

The corridor narrowed. Original mining-vessel proportions, she guessed, built for machines and cargo, not for two hundred human bodies at once. Her shoulder brushed a conduit housing warm to the touch. The air had a mechanical taste, metal and ozone and, underneath it now, vomit.

She passed a woman crying without sound, just tears breaking off her face in slow beads that caught the light before drifting away. Flo logged the face, didn’t know the name yet, and kept moving. Not her problem. Not today. Her problem was six names on a manifest and one hour to make them into something that wouldn’t get themselves killed.

The blue line turned, dropped her through a hatch with a lip she cleared without touching, and there it was.

Squad Bay 4-C.

The room was smaller than her quarters back at the depot on Ceres, and she’d have called those cramped. Eight bunks, stacked in twos against opposite walls, close enough that a broad-shouldered man would have to turn sideways to change between them. A fold-down table bolted to the floor. A single strip of light along the ceiling, buzzing faintly, the kind of buzz that would be the only sound in this room for the next fourteen hours before the burn and probably every hour after it that mattered.

It smelled like hot metal and cleaning solvent that hadn’t quite won the fight against something older.

Flo caught the frame of the hatch and pulled herself through, oriented herself to what would be “up” once thrust kicked in, and found the wall panel. Her palm print unlocked the bunk assignments. Seven names bloomed onto the small display, cross-referenced against her HUD.

FLORENCIA VARGA — SERGEANT— BUNK 1

JACKSON, DYSON. — BUNK 2

DELILAH OKONKWO-REYES (“DEE”) — BUNK 3

CADE WASHINGTON — BUNK 4

FOX, THORTON. — BUNK 5

SASHA ADEYEMI — BUNK 6

SAWYER, REEVES. — BUNK 7

Seven names. Six people to learn and lead.

She anchored herself near the table and waited. She was good at waiting. Thirty-three years old and this was her first deployment, and if anyone found that strange, they hadn’t said it to her face. Twelve years in uniform, all of it training other people’s replacements, running drills nobody thought would matter, until suddenly they did. She’d earned her rank the slow way. She intended to spend it carefully.

The first one through the hatch was a giant. He came through, folded nearly in half to fit, and even then his shoulder scraped the frame, a big man, all of him solid, moving through zero-g with more care than skill but managing it anyway, hand over hand along the same holds she’d used.

“Cade Washington,” he said, before she asked. Deep voice, rounded at the edges, like a man who’d learned a long time ago not to let his size come first into a room. “Bunk four, I’m guessing.”

“You guessed right.” She watched him find it, watched him set his single duffel into the storage net beside it with unhurried hands. No wasted motion, but no urgency either. A man who’d decided, somewhere along the way, that panic cost more than it bought.

The next two came through together, and she knew before her HUD confirmed it that this was going to be the pairing that mattered.

The man came first, pulling himself along the hold rail with a loose, showy carelessness that told her he’d practiced looking unbothered more than he’d practiced actually being unbothered. Wiry. Underfed in a way that had nothing to do with rations, the kind of leanness that came from years of going without and calling it a choice.

JACKSON, D. — twenty-nine, her display told her, though he looked like he’d lived rougher years than that.

“This the shoebox?” he said, to no one, grinning at the room like it owed him an apology. His eyes found Flo last, drifted over her rank insignia, and didn’t change. “Sarge.”

“Bunk two,” Flo said. Didn’t ask his name. She didn’t need to pretend she didn’t know it.

He didn’t answer. Just kept drifting, slow, unbothered, past bunk two like it was a suggestion rather than an order.

The woman behind him was smaller, quicker, dark hair pulled back tight, and she moved through the zero-g like she resented having to think about it at all, economical, a little too fast, correcting hard when she overshot. DELILAH OKONKWO-REYES. Dee, the manifest noted, in the kind of parenthetical that meant somebody far above Flo’s pay grade had already learned better than to use her full name.

“Bunk three,” Flo said.

Dee found it without comment, without even glancing at Jackson, though the set of her jaw said she’d clocked exactly where he was and exactly what he wasn’t doing.

Flo watched that. Filed it.

The last three came in close together, young, all of them, in the particular way that had nothing to do with age. A thin boy with sharp eyes who found his bunk without being told, checked the number twice against something on his own private display, and said nothing at all. FOX, T. Eighteen. He looked like he was doing math the whole time, and maybe he was.

A young woman moved with a straightness to her spine that no zero-g disorientation seemed to touch, though Flo could see the tightness at the corners of her eyes, the specific look of someone holding a great deal very still. SASHA ADEYEMI. Nineteen. She found bunk six, secured her gear with the crisp motions of someone who’d been shown, at some point, by someone who loved her, exactly how a soldier was supposed to move. Whether she believed it yet was a different question.

The last was easy in his body in a way none of the others quite managed, tall, loose-limbed, drifting through the zero-g like he’d been born half-expecting it. SAWYER, R. Twenty-one. He grinned at the room like it was a mildly interesting bar he’d wandered into.

“This the whole crew?” he said, settling toward bunk seven. “Feels like we’re missing somebody dramatic.”

“You’re looking at her,” Cade said, mild, nodding toward Flo, and a couple of the younger ones laughed, thin, nervous laughs, the kind that came out before anyone decided whether it was safe to.

Flo didn’t laugh. Didn’t scowl either. Let the moment pass through her without asking it to be anything.

“Sergeant Varga,” she said, to the room. “You’ll call me Sergeant, or ma’am. Bunks are assigned. Not negotiable, not preference-based, not first-come. You’ll learn why later, but for now: it’s assigned because I said it’s assigned.”

She let that sit a second.

“Burn’s in under an hour. Fourteen hours under acceleration, sedated the whole way. When you wake up, we’ll be across the Kuiper Belt and meeting our new neighbours. That starts with small things. Bunks first.”

Sasha nodded, once, sharp. Fox didn’t move, but she caught the flick of his eyes toward Jackson’s bunk, the only one still empty of its assigned occupant.

Jackson had drifted to the far wall, near bunk seven, arms crossed loosely, watching Dee unpack with an expression that had already decided on its next move.

“Bunk two’s open,” Flo said, not raising her voice.

“I can see that,” Jackson said. Amiable. Unbothered. “Just stretching my legs first, Sarge. Ship’s tiny. Man needs a minute.”

Nobody laughed this time.