*POV: Jake Williams*
PT at 0600 turned out to be the kind of thing that would have been hilarious if it weren't happening to me.
The exercise was simple in concept: navigate an obstacle course while coordinating our abilities. Pixel would hack security doors, Sarah would provide healing boosts at checkpoints, Tank would mark rally points for stamina recovery, and I would clear obstacles with controlled explosions.
Simple. Straightforward. Completely impossible.
"Respawn, you're supposed to blow up the barrier, not the checkpoint!" Sergeant Murphy's voice crackled through our comms as I picked myself up off the ground for the third time in ten minutes.
"The targeting system is glitchy!" I protested, spitting dirt out of my mouth. "It keeps locking onto the wrong targets!"
"The targeting system is fine," Pixel's voice came through crystal clear, because of course her equipment was working perfectly. "You're not calibrating for environmental interference."
"What environmental interference?"
"The electromagnetic field generated by Tank's rally point ability. It's throwing off your lock-on system."
I looked over at Tank, who was standing perfectly still about twenty yards away, somehow managing to look competent even though he was staring at his heads-up display like it was written in ancient Sumerian.
"How was I supposed to know that?" I asked.
"Did you read the technical manual?" Pixel asked.
"Did I... it's six hundred pages!"
"Six hundred and thirty-seven. And yes, this information is covered in chapter twelve, subsection four."
Sarah's voice joined the conversation, slightly out of breath from running between checkpoints: "Maybe we could focus on completing the course instead of arguing about the manual?"
"Medkit's right," Tank said, finally looking up from his HUD. "How do we work around the interference?"
"Either Jake moves to a different firing position, or you adjust your rally point placement," Pixel replied. "The interference has a radius of approximately fifteen meters."
"Okay," Tank said. "Jake, can you handle the barrier from over there?" He pointed to a position that would put me behind cover but still give me a clear shot.
"Yeah, I can make that work."
I jogged over to the new position, noting that my HUD helpfully updated with new targeting data as I moved out of Tank's electromagnetic field. The barrier that had been giving me trouble suddenly had a nice, clear targeting reticle overlaid on its weak point.
"Much better," I said, lining up the shot. "Firing in three... two... one..."
The explosion was perfect. Controlled, precise, and exactly powerful enough to demolish the barrier without damaging anything else. Chunks of concrete flew in aesthetically pleasing arcs, and when the dust settled, there was a perfectly clear path through what had been an impassable obstacle.
"Show off," Pixel muttered, but I could hear the approval in her voice.
"That's what I'm here for." I grinned and jogged toward the next checkpoint, where Sarah was waiting with her hands glowing with the soft blue light that indicated an active healing buff.
"Nice shooting," she said, pressing her palm against my shoulder. Immediately, the fatigue from running and the minor scrapes from my earlier explosions faded away. "How are you feeling?"
"Like I could run a marathon. What's in that healing buff?"
"Enhanced oxygen delivery to muscle tissue, accelerated cellular repair, and a mild stimulant effect," she rattled off. "Don't get addicted to it. The crash afterwards is proportional to the enhancement."
"Noted." I looked ahead to the next obstacle – a locked security door that was definitely Pixel's department. "Pixel, you're up."
"Already on it," came her voice through the comms. "Give me thirty seconds."
I could see her at the door, fingers flying over a tablet that was somehow interfaced with the lock mechanism. Her concentration was absolute – the rest of the world might as well not have existed.
"You know," I said to Sarah while we waited, "I'm starting to think this might actually work."
"The team coordination?"
"All of it. The whole crazy system." I gestured around at the obstacle course, at our glowing equipment, at Tank who was now studying his HUD with the focused intensity that had probably made him a good Marine. "A month ago, the most complicated team coordination I'd ever done was a raid in World of Warcraft. Now we're doing actual military operations with magic healing and exploding barriers."
"The healing isn't magic," Sarah corrected automatically. "It's advanced biotechnology interfacing with—"
"Sarah."
"What?"
"It glows blue and makes people feel better. It's magic."
She smiled. "Okay, it's a little magic."
"Door's open!" Pixel called out. "And Tank, you might want to see this."
We jogged over to where Pixel was still interfaced with the security system. Tank arrived just as she pulled up what looked like a building schematic on her tablet.
"What am I looking at?" Tank asked.
"The obstacle course layout," Pixel said. "But also the security protocols, maintenance schedules, and..." She paused, frowning. "That's weird."
"What's weird?" Sarah asked.
"There are monitoring systems I don't recognize. Cameras, sensors, data loggers – all feeding information to servers that aren't part of the base's main network."
Tank's expression shifted into what I was starting to recognize as his "something's wrong" face. "Unauthorized surveillance?"
"Maybe. Or maybe it's just security protocols I don't have clearance to access." Pixel saved the data to her tablet. "I'll look into it later. Right now, we should finish the course before Sergeant Murphy decides we're taking too long."
She was right. We were already pushing our time limit, and I could see Murphy in the distance, checking his watch with the kind of theatrical impatience that usually preceded unpleasant additional exercises.
The rest of the course went smoothly. Pixel hacked doors, Sarah kept us healthy, Tank marked strategic positions that somehow made everything easier, and I blew things up with increasingly satisfying precision. By the time we crossed the finish line, we were working together like we'd been a team for months instead of hours.
"Not bad for your first run," Murphy said as we gathered around him at the finish line. "Time was acceptable, coordination showed improvement, and nobody died."
"That's the bar for success?" Tank asked.
"You'd be surprised how many teams fail to clear that bar on their first attempt," Murphy replied. "Gamma squad lost three people to a malfunctioning barrier last week. Delta squad's medic accidentally poisoned the entire team trying to test a new healing formula."
"Accidentally?" Sarah asked.
"That's the official story. Personally, I think Delta squad's tank was being an ass and she decided to teach him a lesson."
"Did it work?" I asked.
Murphy grinned. "Like a charm. He's been perfectly polite ever since."
We were walking back toward the barracks when Pixel's tablet started chiming urgently. She pulled it out, frowned at the display, and then stopped walking entirely.
"Guys," she said, "we have a problem."
"What kind of problem?" Tank asked.
"The kind where all of our personal files have been accessed by an unknown user in the last hour."
We all stopped walking.
"All of our files?" Sarah asked.
"Everything. Service records, psychological evaluations, family contact information, financial records, medical histories..." Pixel's fingers were flying over her tablet. "Someone with high-level access credentials pulled comprehensive background data on all four of us."
"Could it be routine?" Tank asked. "Administrative review or something?"
"At 0630 on our first day of team training? Unlikely." Pixel looked up from her tablet. "And the access came from outside the base's normal command structure."
"Meaning?"
"Meaning someone who doesn't officially exist here knows everything about us."
I felt a chill that had nothing to do with the desert morning air. "So what do we do?"
Tank was quiet for a moment, thinking. Then: "We finish our training day. We learn our jobs. And tonight, we figure out who's watching us and why."
"Just like that?" Sarah asked.
"Just like that," Tank confirmed. "If someone's going to spy on us, they'll learn that Respawn Squad Alpha doesn't back down from a fight."
Pixel smiled, and for the first time since I'd met her, it looked genuinely predatory. "I like the way you think, Tank."
"Good," Tank said. "Because if we're going to survive whatever this is, we're going to need to trust each other completely."
He looked at each of us in turn. "Can I count on you?"
"Always," Sarah said immediately.
"You
know it," I added.
"Absolutely," Pixel confirmed.
Tank nodded. "Then let's go learn how to be the best damn squad Fort Respawn has ever seen."
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