Shotguns and Spacesuits

Before she became 49, the whisper on every sealed corridor and smugglers' deck; before her name drifted across the black like a rumor wrapped in ion smoke, she was simply 349-a creche-born girl with no birthday, no possessions, and no future beyond the factory floor.

When the corporation chose her for Security training, it should have been a blessing. Instead, it became an ordeal that stripped her to bone and will. On a frozen plain beneath the shadow of Cincinnati Orbital, 349 and her fellow cadets are driven through exhaustion, ice, fire, and vacuum. Under the cold command of Senior Instructor Tercio, they learn to tread water in full gear, crawl through collapsing structures, fire shotguns in drifting half-gravity, and fall from orbit wrapped only in a shell of ablative ceramic. They learn to obey, to endure, to survive.