Chapter 3: A Place Among Ghosts
The barracks were buried beneath a hundred meters of Martian rock.
No windows. No clocks. No softness.
Each cadet was assigned a sleep pod—modular, coffin-sized bunks stacked in rows of eight, regulated for oxygen intake, REM optimization, and emergency seal in case of breach. Privacy? A luxury long extinct.
Kale stood at the threshold of his assigned pod.
Pod Unit 91-G.
He stared at it for a full ten seconds before stepping inside. The hatch hissed shut behind him, sealing him in darkness laced with the soft hum of life support.
He didn't sleep.
He analyzed.
---
Reveille came at 0400 local time. A klaxon howled through the steel corridors like a banshee dragging its claws against bulkheads. Lights activated with brutal clarity, frying any hope of peaceful rest.
Kale was already awake.
His bunkmates weren't.
Two groaned. One threw up into the drainage tube.
Only Ox—spike-eyed and twitchy—sat up with a grin. "Rise and rot, boys. We're in the meat house now."
---
Their first drill was held in the Black Garden, a massive subterranean arena used for physical conditioning and team coordination tests. Artificial gravity here fluctuated between Earth norm and Mars native, forcing their bodies to adapt or collapse.
Lieutenant Commander Veya Hart waited with a tablet in hand and a face like frozen steel.
"You'll be divided into ten squads," she said. "Each squad will navigate the killcourse. Terrain will shift. Gravity will fail. Your objectives: reach the far terminal intact. Team failure equals personal failure."
Kale was assigned Squad Echo.
It included Ox, the quiet burn-scar girl—Kora, he learned later—and a rich boy with a sharp jawline and an even sharper voice named Cassian Dorne.
Cassian looked at Kale like someone had handed him a used sock and told him it was royalty.
"You're in charge?" Cassian said, eyeing Kale's rankless uniform. "Please. You probably don't even know how to read a tactical scan."
Kale didn't answer.
He simply pointed to the simulation schematic hovering in front of them. "We have ninety seconds before the walls collapse inward. The pressure plates are motion-tracked, and the exit will rotate every time we trigger a trip sensor."
Cassian blinked.
Ox grinned.
Kora just nodded.
Kale looked at them. "We go left, disable the floor panels using Kora's weight differential, trigger the shift manually, then reroute through the maintenance crawl. We'll get there in six minutes flat."
Cassian opened his mouth—then closed it.
No one questioned him after that.
---
They made it in five minutes, fifty-seven seconds.
Second fastest squad.
First place went to Squad Alpha—led by none other than Rell Varik, still smug, still perfect, flanked by his private crew of Ganymede aristocrats and orbital-born prodigies. They walked off the field like they owned the planet.
Hart's voice echoed across the arena. "Echo Squad: impressive. But not impressive enough."
Cassian looked furious.
Kale? He just watched Rell.
Watched how he moved. How he positioned himself at the front, but always let his second-in-command do the technical work. How his teammates laughed just a bit too loud at his jokes. How even Hart lingered a moment too long while giving him his score.
Command presence. Manufactured. Polished. Fragile.
It was all a game. Rell just played it differently.
Kale would break him piece by piece.
---
The week bled into a haze of drills, lectures, and constant monitoring. The cadets were ranked hourly. One bad meal or slow time in the lav could cost you ten places. Fail a test? You were on the chopping block.
By Day 5, three cadets were gone. Not expelled—just missing. No announcement. No ceremony. Their pods were empty by morning.
By Day 7, the simulations started.
---
The first scenario was called Voidfall.
A full-bore shipwreck sim, zero-g, no life support. Cadets were dropped into separate decks of a virtual cruiser under siege from boarding xenos. Objectives: survive, maintain command integrity, extract key personnel.
Kale's team was shredded in ten minutes.
Not because of him—but because of Cassian.
The bastard froze under pressure. Kora took a hit protecting the medic. Ox got separated. Cassian retreated to the escape pod and left everyone behind.
They failed.
Hart reviewed the footage before the class. Paused it at the moment Cassian sealed the hatch on his squad.
Then she spoke one word: "Coward."
Cassian's face turned white.
Kale said nothing.
But he made a note in his head:
> Cassian Dorne – Weak. Cracks under fire. Likely to turn on others. Dangerous only when cornered.
---
That night, as they filed into mess, Kale was stopped in the corridor by a girl with silver-white hair and violet eyes that didn't blink nearly enough.
"Your simulation timing was off by 3.4 seconds," she said.
He frowned. "Excuse me?"
She stepped closer. No smile. No emotion.
"You turned right instead of rerouting through the vent path. The rebreather charge you found at the medbay would've lasted 34 seconds longer if you'd retrieved the coolant canister on Deck C-9."
Kale blinked. "You were watching?"
She didn't answer. Just turned and walked away.
He caught her name later—Lie Cadence.
Top ten percentile. Xenolinguistics major. Allegedly came from a family of data forgers on Europa. Rumor was she hacked the academy's entrance psych filters just to get in.
Kale didn't know if that was true.
But he remembered her face.
And the way she saw everything.
---
By the end of Week 2, Kale's name was 27th out of 300.
Cassian was 19th.
Rell Varik? First. Of course.
Kora was 43rd, but rising.
Ox had dropped to 71st after a misfire in the live-fire drill.
But something had shifted.
People were watching Kale now. Not because he looked the part—he still wore the same stripped uniform, still didn't speak unless necessary—but because when things went wrong, he always knew why.
That made people curious.
And it made the elites nervous.
Rell confronted him during routine mech maintenance in the bay.
"You're not going to last," he said, wiping engine grease off his gloves. "They'll weed you out. Sooner or later."
Kale didn't look at him. "Then why are you here, telling me that?"
Rell's eyes narrowed.
Kale looked up, calm. "If you're so confident, why waste your breath?"
Rell stared at him. For a long moment, neither moved.
Then Rell smiled.
And walked away.
---
That night, someone filed a falsified complaint against Kale—accusing him of stealing restricted oxygen rations.
It almost worked.
If not for the internal security feed Kale had silently rerouted during a previous drill to monitor his own bunk corridor.
The accuser's name was blacked out in the file.
But Kale knew.
He just didn't retaliate. Not yet.
Because sometimes the most dangerous thing you can do... is wait.
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