"You shot down a stealthed micro drone a few minutes ago."

Adi's thoughts stopped cold. She looked back at the scavenger.

"I did."

"Been keepin' an eye on the pieces." He shrugged. "You let me have 'em, I keep quiet about seein' you in the 'hood for a while. Eh?"

Adi studied him for a moment.

"Drone bits fetch good credits," he said. "Stealth coating, eh? Even better."

"Anybody else looking for the wreckage? One of the gangs, maybe? You said this was disputed territory."

The scavenger barked a laugh.

"Nah, fem. After all that heavy machine-gun racket? Ain't nobody fucking stupid enough to poke their head out for a while."

Adi nodded once. "Take them. We never met."

She knew the shattered remains of a drone that sophisticated would fetch enough credits on the black market to keep a junkie wrecked for days. With a curt nod, she stepped aside, letting her Shadowfury hang from its retention strap to clear the narrow doorway.

"I see anyone on my back trail, I shoot first. I don't ask fucking questions."

Her jaw tightened as the scav exploded from its nest of trash with the speed only scavs ever seemed capable of, a rag-cloaked revenant one heartbeat and a blur of motion the next. Rotting food, stale urine, and chemical decay billowed into the air as it slipped past her with unsettling grace, its tattered rags fluttering like diseased wings.

Adi watched without a word as the scav gathered the drone fragments with the practiced efficiency of someone who had done this countless times before. The pieces disappeared into the filthy folds of their clothing before they retreated to their nest.

"Thanks, fem," they muttered, already disappearing into the festering heap like a rat vanishing into the corpse of a building. Crumpled food cartons and broken slabs of insulation settled around them, swallowing the nest once more.

The smell lingered like an accusation.

"No problem," Adi said flatly, and pulled the trigger.

The ArcSpiker cracked. Its twin-pronged dart buried itself in the scav's throat, and blue-white electricity erupted across their body. Every muscle locked simultaneously, lifting them onto their toes before they collapsed in an uncontrolled heap. The smell of singed hair and scorched cloth briefly eclipsed the stench of the trash.

Adi waited, watching the involuntary tremors fade. Satisfied that the scav was unconscious, she stepped forward.

She kept her Valkyrie heavy pistol holstered on her right thigh, her hand instinctively hovering near it while her left controlled the ArcSpiker with practiced ease. When fractions of a second mattered, she favored her right, but years of brutal Marine training had made either hand equally lethal.

Her neural overlays remained calm. No new threats appeared. The scav's ragged breathing slowed as the involuntary spasms subsided. She watched for several long heartbeats, eyes narrowing.

Still alive. Good enough.

In one fluid motion, Adi snapped open her spring-loaded baton and jabbed it into the scav's shoulder. No reaction. The baton emitted a faint hum, its shock core drawing power from an internal nuclear battery. Her HUD showed five charges remaining. She left the voltage dialed low. Unnecessary brutality wasted both energy and options.

Grimacing, she nudged the scav onto their side, silently cursing herself for leaving her rubber gloves with the motorcycle. A shiver of revulsion ran through her. She hated being dirty. Touching the filthy scav made her skin crawl.

"Gah! Do you fucking roll around in your own latrine?" she muttered. "Fuck. When was the last time you met soap and water?"

She eased the unconscious scav fully into the recovery position with practiced precision. Every point of contact made her stomach tighten. The scav's rags were stiff with old grime, and the air hung heavy with the cloying stink of rot, stale urine, and chemical decay. She fought the urge to wipe her hands on something, anything, even though she knew it would accomplish nothing.

A faint scuttling echoed somewhere in the darkness, barely loud enough to hear. A chill crept down her spine.

Probably cockroaches.

They had arrived with the first wave of colonial supplies, hitchhiking aboard cargo containers. The Machine Wars had done the rest. Mutated, highly resilient, and all but impossible to eradicate, the cockroaches thrived in places like this.

She hoped it was cockroaches making the noise.

Thick nylon flex cuffs bound the scav's wrists to their ankles. Tight enough to prevent trouble if they woke sooner than expected, loose enough to avoid cutting off circulation.

Satisfied, Adi used her baton like a shovel, pushing damp cardboard, decomposing takeout containers, and stained rags back over the unconscious scav until only another mound of refuse remained.

Out of sight.

Out of mind.

Note to self, she thought. Disinfect the baton at the first opportunity.

Her gaze swept the shadows once more. Her neural net's Threat Assessment held steady at high orange. No elevated threats. Far from safe. This neighborhood’s situation could escalate to full red rapidly.

One less variable, she thought as she adjusted the messenger bag across her chest and gave her war belt a final check.

The street remained unnervingly quiet.

For now.

Across the city, Kane and AI Kuro watched the drone's live feed from Kane's apartment. The replacement micro drone orbited high above the neighborhood, well beyond the distance where Adi was likely to detect it. Both silently hoped she would eventually understand that institutional surveillance didn't require an enemy.

It only required a system.

Kuro broke the silence.

"Brutal."

"Prudent," Kane corrected. "She doesn't want anyone on her back trail."

"Her surveillance detection route is incomplete."

Kane frowned.

"She knows."

"Correct. She is consciously accepting additional risk."

"Because she's prioritizing speed over certainty."

"Yes."

Kane nodded once.

"She's worried about Rena."

"Did you notice her reaction time?"

Kane glanced at the AI's display.

"No. Why?"

"It's already well above baseline human."

"Some of her Colonial Marine augmentations are still active. That should be in your files."

"It is," Kuro replied. "I accounted for them."

A new graph bloomed across the display.

"With the planned upgrades, Adi will become an absolute nightmare for anyone attempting to stop her."

Kane allowed himself a thin smile. "That's the idea."

Kuro continued. "Enhanced reflexes. Improved visual overlays. Upgraded subdermal armor. Individually, each enhancement is significant. Together, they create a multiplicative effect. She will identify threats sooner, decide faster, and survive injuries that would incapacitate most augmented operators."

Kane folded his arms.

"Where she's going, power armor isn't an option. Her augmentations have to do the heavy lifting."

Once the trussed-up scav was beneath their stinking nest, Adi sprinted toward another randomly chosen doorway. Myrmidons weren't sprinters, not like the Colonial Force Recon Gazelles. Those tall, willowy Mud Marine freaks, bio-engineers designed them for blistering 95 kph bursts inside their lightweight scout armor.

Finesse was not a characteristic of the Myrmidons. They built them to hit like orbital strikes. Every movement emphasized explosive power, relentless aggression, and unstoppable momentum. Adi could cover ground frighteningly fast over short distances, even if she'd never match a Gazelle in a straight sprint.

The new doorway smelled only marginally better than the last, but it was an improvement. Even so, the mound of refuse slumped against the wall made her skin crawl. This was exactly why she'd joined the Colonial Fleet Marines instead of the Mud Marines. Space stations were dirty. Ships were dirty. But planets? Planets were filthy.

Extending her collapsible baton, she methodically swept through the pile, checking for hidden bodies, sleeping scavs, or anyone patient enough to wait for prey.

Note to self, repeated for emphasis, sterilize baton ASAP.

To almost everyone else, joining the Fleet Marines versus the Mud Marines would be about mission profile, prestige, career opportunities, or culture. For Adi, one of the deciding factors was simply, "I don't want to spend my life crawling around in mud and garbage."

Despite deliberately choosing the cleaner branch of military service, she's now knee-deep in one of the filthiest neighborhoods on Chendiuria, rummaging through piles of garbage with a baton. Fate has a fucking sick sense of humor.

She would not get fucking surprised again.

Not tonight.

Her mind cycled through hazard probabilities, constantly cross-checking them against her situational awareness protocols while her stomach kept up its relentless, low gnaw.

Leaving her Shadowfury hanging from its retention strap across her chest, Adi fished another Shitty-C ration bar from her messenger bag and sliced it into bite-sized chunks with her higonokami-style utility knife. She chewed mechanically, forcing herself to swallow the dry, carob-flavored pieces.

Every bite tasted like someone had melted cheap fucking plastic into weak synthetic chocolate, then mixed in sand and fine gravel for texture. Shitty-C bars were dense little bricks of protein, vitamins, micronutrients, and pure fucking disappointment in a package barely larger than a candy bar. Everything a marine needed. Nothing anybody actually wanted to eat.

A normal, unaugmented citizen could survive on a single Sean Cawley bar each day. For Adi, fueling a hyper-accelerated metabolism alongside high-drain sensory augmentations and multispectral overlays, one barely kept her body from cannibalizing itself.

Seven. Maybe eight bars a day if she wanted her bioware and nanites to stay ahead of routine repair cycles. Even minor damage to her subdermal armor meant a trip to a MedFac that specialized in augmented patients. Repairs cost credits she rarely had and time she could almost never spare.

She forced down a second bar, then a third, chasing them with a bottle of water. The empty bottle crinkled in her fist before she shoved it into a pocket to recycle later. Waste was expensive on Chendiuria.

She tucked another Sean Cawley bar into a pouch on her tactical vest for later, drained a second bottle of water, crushed it flat, and stowed it beside the first. The bitter, metallic tang of the filtration resin lingered on the back of her tongue.

Adi leaned against the doorway, half-hidden by the shadows. The Lower City's decaying infrastructure benefited her: shattered streetlights, neglected power lines, and camera poles stripped for salvage years ago. No surveillance.

The Robbies, and the city AIs coordinating them, wouldn't waste processing cycles this deep inside disputed gang territory. Robbies are the physical enforcement arm of a much larger AI policing network. Patrols here were expensive, dangerous, and statistically unrewarding. The joys of living under AI-managed civic governance.

This wasn't one of First City's polished districts built for the wealthy and the upwardly mobile. This neighborhood survived on sex, drugs, cheap alcohol, and violence. The city AIs concentrated their Robbies where the taxpayers, executives, politicians, and tourists lived. Protect the people who generated revenue.

Everyone else could wait. At least until they went broke.

Deportation often followed personal bankruptcy in the exclusive Eighth Terrace to the slums. The city didn't forget you. It just stopped caring.

You should've run a full SDR, she scolded herself. Fucking stupid. Amateur-hour bullshit.

She swept her back trail again through the Shadowfury's optics, cycling from standard vision to telescopic, infrared, and ultraviolet. The UV bounce sometimes revealed things the naked eye missed.

Nothing.

Her back trail remained clear.

Cautious, but never satisfied, Adi broke into another sprint. The remaining blocks disappeared in a series of short, explosive bursts. Her powerful frame flowed through the narrow alleys, boots striking the uneven ferrocrete with practiced economy. Even burdened with a war belt, body armor, tactical vest, boom bag slung across one shoulder, and her Shadowfury secured across her chest, she moved like an apex predator.

At last, she spotted the mismatched neon glow of Rena and her husbands' pachinko parlor. The battered three-story building leaned slightly on its aging foundations, but appearances were deceptive. It was secure. Rena and her husbands weren't wealthy by First City standards, but they owned the entire block outright.

More importantly...

They knew how to keep it that way.

Adi slowed, letting her pace bleed away. Her Threat Assessment Program automatically stepped down to Condition Yellow.

Hyperaware.

Ready.

Something still wasn't right.

"She's wary," Kuro observed.

"She has every right to be," Kane said. "She's alone. Out there, she's her own security."

He kept his gaze fixed on the drone's feed.

"I've worked for enough governments and corporations to know how they think. Her service record says she learned the same lesson I did." He exhaled through his nose. "In institutions that size, security recommendations don't become policy until somebody bleeds."

"An inefficient process," Kuro said.

Kane snorted. "Very."

"Most Chendiurian security organizations appear to operate under a similar model. Corrective action is typically deferred until the consequences affect someone politically or economically significant."