Chapter 73:

Chapter 73: The Gold Foil

The fake steak tasted like salt and burned garlic powder, and Caleb ate every bite of it.

Rank C stipend meant the premium menu line instead of the gray paste vat at the back of the mess. He sawed through the slab with a serrated knife that wasn’t sharp enough for the job, chewed slow, and let the calories settle. The thing under his ribs took the food without arguing today. That was as close to peace as he got anymore.

Hiro sat across from him stripping his rifle on the metal table, gravy bowl pushed off to one side. A streak of underground soot still ran along the kid’s jaw. He hadn’t noticed it yet. His hands moved over the receiver without the shake they’d had two weeks ago, and that was the thing Caleb kept clocking. The shake was gone.

A tray dropped hard onto the table. Iharu slid onto the bench, glared at the meltwater dripping off his boots, and stabbed his fork into something green and rubbery.

"You held the line," Iharu said.

He kept his eyes on the food. The tone wasn’t friendly. It was the next-closest thing he had.

Hiro looked up. "Yeah?"

"Yeah." Iharu chewed. Swallowed. "Floor dropped. I figured you’d lock up."

"I was tracking the frost line."

"Whatever you were tracking, it worked." Iharu pointed the fork at him. "When that crawler came around the strut, you put the round in the joint. Half-second slower and it takes my leg off."

"It was favoring its right." Hiro went back to his rifle. "Sludge that deep, it had to plant the left claws harder to find purchase. I shot the footprint."

Iharu chewed on that. He didn’t argue. He pulled apart his bread roll and didn’t argue, which was its own kind of answer.

Caleb drank cold water from a scratched cup and watched it land. The kid wasn’t reacting anymore. He was reading. There was a difference, and Caleb had been waiting to see which side of it Hiro came down on.

"Clean shot," Caleb said. "You didn’t wait for someone to call it."

"I figured I had about a second." Hiro shrugged. "Saw the gap."

"Don’t get cocky," Iharu said. "You fumbled the reload. Two thermal clips, dropped the second one in the mud. I saw."

"My gloves are too thick for the magazine grip. I’m taping them tonight."

"Tape’s a band-aid."

"Then it’ll be a band-aid that works."

Iharu snorted into his water cup. He was almost smiling. Caleb registered that and let it go without comment, because pointing it out would kill it.

Two tables over, somebody was telling the same Mimic-tunnel story everybody had been telling for a month. The version got bigger every time. Caleb had stopped listening to it after the third retelling because the kid telling it hadn’t been there. The squad around the storyteller laughed in the right places. Past their bench, a Rank D with a bandage running from his temple to his collar was eating one-handed and watching Caleb’s table without pretending he wasn’t.

Caleb met his eyes. Held it. The Rank D went back to his food.

Hiro reassembled the rifle in his lap and didn’t look up. "Who was that."

"Don’t know him."

"He was looking at you the whole time you ate."

"I noticed."

Iharu pushed his tray away and leaned back. "Maybe he just likes your face."

"Maybe."

"You’re going to have to start sitting with your back to a wall if this keeps up."

"I already do."

Iharu glanced at the wall behind Caleb, registered that he was right, and let it go.

Caleb finished the steak, scraped his tray onto the conveyor, and pushed out into the corridor.

He passed the Rank D’s table on the way to the door. The man didn’t look up. He kept his bandaged side angled toward the wall and kept eating. There were three other recruits at his bench, and none of them had spoken the whole time Caleb had been in the room. That was the thing that registered. Not the look. The silence around the look.

Shift change. The hallway moved in two directions at once, mechanics hauling crates one way, medics with linen carts the other, somebody shouting about a delivery error from the loading dock end. Caleb kept his shoulder near the wall and let the traffic split around him.

"Mercer."

Elara was leaning against a pillar with her arms crossed, helmet off, hair pulled back tight enough to show the line of her temple. She’d been on the extraction grid for eighteen hours. It showed in her eyes and nowhere else.

He stepped out of the foot traffic.

"Captain."

She didn’t move from the pillar. She just dropped her voice under the corridor noise.

"Your sponsor board locked again this morning."

"Yeah."

"Through legal channels. She’s not even hiding it now."

"I don’t have any control over the money," Caleb said.

"That’s not the point I’m making."

He waited.

Elara watched a pair of recruits pass and waited until they were past her shoulder. "You’ve got veterans in this sector who took three years to make Rank C. Some of them buried squadmates getting there. Now you’re up in nine weeks because someone bought the grid."

"They can resent me. I still have to do the drops."

"That’s not how it works in the field." She wasn’t lecturing. She was saying it flat, the way she used to give him directions back to the access tunnels when they were kids, the same voice. "If they decide you’re a corporate pet, they don’t cover your blind side. They let the bite land. They make a point with their cameras off and their suit telemetry conveniently glitching."

"Has anyone said anything?"

"Not to me. They wouldn’t."

Caleb rubbed at the medical tape on his knuckles. The adhesive was peeling at the edges from sweat.

"There’s a Rank D who was watching me eat just now," he said. "Bandage on his neck."

"Hassek. Lost his squad lead in the cave breach. He’s been quiet since he came out of medical, which is worse than loud."

"Should I be worried about him."

"He won’t do anything in the barracks. If he does anything, he’ll do it on a drop, where it looks like a Kaiju did it." She said it without heat, the way a quartermaster would tell him the weight of a magazine. "Watch the mess hall. Watch who sits where. Watch who doesn’t sit with you."

"You sound like you’ve seen this before."

"I’ve seen it twice." She didn’t elaborate. "First one didn’t come back. Second one did, but only because his squad medic was stubborn."

"Comforting."

"It wasn’t meant to be."

She gave him a small nod, professional, the kind that closed the conversation cleanly. Then, quieter, with her eyes still on the corridor and not on him: "If anything feels wrong on a drop, call it. Don’t tough it out. I’ll back the call."

She didn’t wait for a response. She stepped back into the corridor flow and was gone in three strides.

Caleb stood there a few more seconds before he moved.