"I came to Granica V with fifty operatives. Chosen men, well suited to the mission ahead. Before us stood a thankless task, without promise of glory or reward. We knew the risks. Understood the full consequences of what we would accomplish, were we to achieve success.

Fully half of those men I left behind in the ruins of New Cadiz. Tonight, more of our brothers have fallen. I am now left with but a handful of those I originally set out with. Yet I do not despair. This mission is the culmination of my life's work, a final act of contrition for the sins we committed as a species. Even with tonight's setback, I remain resolute. Arrowhead approaches fruition; and, with it, my redemption.

There are those who would seek to stop us, to deny us our long-sought victory. They do not understand the extent of our preparation:

Argjend is our city. Our influence is everywhere. Our resources, infinite.

Humanity will thank us, and they will never know our names."

- excerpt from a private record, author unknown

Finally green-lit access to the district, emergency response teams flooded into the Refugee Zone, the whooping peal of their sirens splitting the air; waves of red light washing back and forth over the bullet ripped walls like some baleful lighthouse. For once, there were no bricks thrown, nor insults hurled. The traumatised citizens crowded the police escort, yammering for assistance, pushing their wounded forward to receive attention. Those who had not taken a stray round in the mayhem stood back and held those closest. Many wept. One or two shouted out challenges to the cops as they set up a perimeter, but for the most part a prevailing sense of shock held the crowds in check. Anger would come later.

The response teams pulled bodies out of the Refugee Zone long into the early hours of the morning. The EMTs were long since desensitised to pulling bodies from the streets of the city edge (often under heavy police escort), but this was different. This was killing on another scale entirely. Many were sick, or had to take a moment to catch their breath when another ruined door was shunted aside, revealing the charnel house within. Those who had served in the Human Covenant war suffered flashbacks, had to shake themselves before pressing on, jaws set.

There would be many inconsistencies to the police reports that morning. Many questioned the ballistic reports in particular, wondering how it was that street gangs gained access to weaponry of such lethal potency.

Those raising these questions were not there that night, when a trio of grey coloured M831 Troop transports trundled up next to smouldering ruins of the warehouse. Behind them followed two large black vans, otherwise unmarked.

Aengus McBride's Warthog ground to a halt, engine purring. In the rear seat were stern, dangerous men. His men. Bundled at their feet in the rear troop carriers were large, bulky crates; labelled as medical supplies. The men began leaping down from the rear compartment, fanning out over the area.

A police officer intercepted this strange new convoy. A short man, with a sharp widow's peak. Unimpressive, physically; but street tough like so many police in the Western District. He'd been pulled out of bed in the middle of the night, and was short on both sleep and diplomacy.

"Detective Greggs, Homicide. You're entering a secure crime scene." His badge flashed, catching the crackling fires that had yet to die out around them, "Who the fuck are you?"

Greggs' bravado withered considerably when McBride stepped down from the vehicle. He towered a head and shoulders above Greggs; a slab-jawed man with a trimmed beard and broad-set shoulders that seemed to be a direct extension of his bull neck.

McBride flashed him a badge of his own. About the only thing on it that was real was his photograph and the silver ONI symbol. But it would clear any background check a member of the APD could hope to run. Becker owned the APD, had done so for almost five years.

"Naval Intelligence. We're taking over."

He brushed past, ambling toward the warehouse.

"On whose authority?" Greggs bristled, arms spread wide. At that McBride turned, placed a hand on Gregg's shoulder. It was not a friendly gesture. He leaned close, closer than was necessary.

"On your Commissioner's authority, Detective. You're standing in ground zero of a major terrorist attack. This is military jurisdiction now, which makes it my jurisdiction." Their noses were almost touching as McBride leered down at him. "And we just lost a lot of good people tonight. So don't test me."

The hand released his shoulder. The other spooks swept past, contemptuous.

"Is this for real?" Greggs turned around to his partner, Lester Edgerton, who was half standing in the passenger seat of their patrol car, looking on. Edgerton just knitted his eyebrows and shrugged mournfully as Greggs joined him at the edge of the scene.

"You know… I've been around, Greggs. Fifteen years, city police." Edgerton fixed him with one of those paternal stares he so often favoured, "And there's three things I don't fuck with: our superiors, my ex-wife, and Naval Intelligence."

"This is bullshit." Greggs hissed.

"This is the Western District. Bullshit comes with the territory."

The radio warbled something that only Edgerton caught. The other duty officers were already filing back toward the entry gate of the 'Zone, back to the wider perimeter where the hordes of citizens looked on, rubber-necked.

"Maybe so. But it looks like it's official. Orders from on-high: we're being re-tasked. Perimeter duty, to await further instructions."

McBride watched them leave. When the last officer had departed, he turned to his men.

"Already, we have a limited window, let's make this quick."

The medical supplies were set on the ground, snapped open. Inside were all manner of illegal fire-arms: MA5's with the serial numbers filed off, cut down Koslovic assault rifles; the stocks removed, the metal work scratched and painted with all manner of lurid chalk-work.

Most of the weapons were dressed in rags, or had been customised in some way. Many of their magazines had been partially emptied in a secure off-site location.

The weapons were scattered amongst the bodies, tossed here and there. One of the crates held the shell casings associated with each of the guns; air-sealed in plastic bags. The operatives tore them open, tinkling them down around where each of the weapons lay.

Then the van doors opened. The rear holds contained cold storage units. Loaded on gurneys and slide trays were flash-frozen bodies, still venting steam from the heat-thaw. Documented insurrectionists, many of whom had been pulled from the ruins of New Cadiz. Some had been in captivity until earlier that morning. Becker had left little to chance; this had been his contingency in the event something went awry. His preparation in all things was absolute.

The operatives set the bodies among the devastation, removing their own men from the scene. Recorder drones flashed as they took still-frame images of the fallen insurgents, uploading them to local media sites via automated proxies. The narrative would be simple: a terrorist attack, one that set alight gang tensions and resolved itself with bloody inevitability. Any claims to the contrary would be dismissed as wild fantasy; debunked by the very clear evidence that was being - at this very moment - manufactured.

Elements wouldn't stack, but it would be enough. All you needed was a degree of misdirection, and then the public's imagination, and the media that stoked it, would do the rest. Any of the surviving members would be picked up by other clean-up teams acting on Becker's instructions. Those who could be salvaged would be given medical treatment, then assigned to the replacement response team that would inevitably be prepared. Those who lost their nerve would be mem-wiped, before being inducted into a veteran's home, the proud owners of an entirely new medical service history. Their service would be at an end.

The bodies of the fallen troopers were lifted carefully into sealed body bags, before being loaded back in the vans. It was a neat exchange with the bodies being planted. Soon, the site was entirely clear of incriminating material.

"Sir, better take a look at this." One of his men clipped over the mic.

McBride stepped into the hollowed out, charred skeleton of the warehouse. A trio of his men were clustered around one of the ruined assault cannons discarded on the warehouse floor. McBride pushed past, bending down to scrutinise the ruined weapon.

The rear of the cannon had blown back, the ammunition feeder belt lighting up like a firecracker. McBride turned it over in his hands, grunting as he hefted the heavy weight of the weapon onto its side, inspecting further.

The rotary mechanism had jammed. Something had manually ensnared the barrel, retarding the internal motors and leaving deep indentations on the barrels themselves. McBride's eyes narrowed. The indentations were grooves, quite distinctive in shape and form.

Finger marks; somebody had grabbed the weapon by the barrel. Had been strong enough to bend steel with grip strength alone. The brute power on display was humbling.

"What do you make of it, Sir?" That was Tanner, McBride's lieutenant. He was a broad man, with a shaved head and a trimmed goatee.

McBride scratched at his beard, unimpressed.

"Tells me enough." McBride sniffed and spat on the ground, "Tells me what we're up against."

The last body they removed was Pershing's, right on the edge of the scene.

McBride and Tanner stood over him for a moment. Neither spoke. McBride was not a sentimental man. He had killed just about everything there was to kill in the universe: brutes, split-jaws, humans of all shapes and sizes. He'd even taken a run at a Spartan once. Would have finished the job too, had that been the objective. Reflection did not come to him naturally.

Still, he took a moment for Pershing. The man had served.

McBride knelt over the body. Pershing had no dog tags to speak of, had no next of kin or any known family. Like the rest of Becker's men, he was a ghost, serving in a fraternity of men that had long since vanished from the official record. McBride hadn't known the man well, but they had furthered a cause together. That meant something.

"We'll get the bastards, brother," he murmured, closing Pershing's eyes. "'Sic Semper Tyrannis'."

McBride frowned as he examined the chest wound that had demolished Pershing's chest plate. He turned and looked at the warehouse. The exit wound was to the front, which meant the bullet had entered from a direction facing the warehouse, utterly at odds with the rest of the casualties they had removed from the site. Sniper round, heavy calibre; coming in from an elevated position.

Reflexively McBride turned and looked over his shoulder, a prickle of unease tickling his stomach. The towers of the 'Zone rose up all around him. There was no shortage of perches a shooter could take.

McBride opened his com.

"Sir, I've found Pershing."

"Status?" Becker replied smoothly.

"KIA. Took a sniper round from an elevated position. Only the angle's wrong. Whatever happened to the ground team, I don't think it was the same operator. Either they had backup, or we're dealing with a second interested party."

"Understood. Return to our main facility as soon as possible. I want a replacement taskforce operational within twenty four hours."

"Yes Sir, I'll make it our top priority." McBride nodded, "One last thing. The bodies in the warehouse, the evidence on site is consistent with a Spartan deployment."

"So 239 has made his move. Very well. We're at a critical stage; disturbances to the program cannot be permitted."

"Understood, Sir. We'll take care of it."

McBride rose to his feet. He touched his mic-bead, spreading the official word.

"Pack it up, we're done here."

By the time the media cam-drones and journalists were permitted access to the site, the unmarked convoy was long gone. Gone with them was any evidence of the dismantled kill team.

Rashid's initial concern began when Rebecca was late for their meeting at Havenwood Medical.

This was unusual. Rebecca was never late. This concern mounted when, thirty minutes later, he tried her Chatter line several times. His worry graduated to outright panic when he ran a trace-cert on her data pad, and pinged it as moving enroute to the Refugee Zone: precisely the opposite direction she was meant to be going.

In the stories Rashid had read and seen on the vids, a man placed in such a position would go in one of either two opposing directions. They would either seek to inform the authorities, and trust in the ability of civil society to resolve the matter satisfactorily (where a heroic law enforcement official would doubtlessly save the day), or they would do the opposite: they would go out on their own, tear the city apart in a relentless vigilante quest to find their friend.

Rashid, not being a man of half measures, decided to do both of these things at once. First he logged a missing persons complaint with the APD under an assumed alias. Then, fully cognisant of the fact that he was hospital bound and under careful military supervision (and thus not in a position to go on a vigilante rampage of any meaningful import), decided that any quest on his part would have to play to his strengths.

Which meant systems intrusion.

Rashid's long recovery process was an anomaly amongst Spartans. They were supposed to be immortal, impervious to damage; and quick to heal when they were injured. Chimera Four's prevailing injury was something of a sensitive subject to the brass, an embarrassment of sorts. This played to his advantage. They had secreted him away in a private screening room, isolated from the communal long term recovery wards. There were two MP's stationed outside, but neither ever bothered him, save for offering him the occasional coffee, or asking him his thoughts on the local grav-ball team. Six months of non-recovery had made them lax. Minding Chimera Four was deemed a cushy posting, low-risk.

That was good. Rashid would need the privacy.

Rashid's delving deck was a complex, custom job. It had physical, old school keys inset into it, which was something of a throwback in this day and age. Rashid loved the tactile chunkiness of it; had built it himself out of all manner of scavenged parts. But this was a serious matter. He would need considerable more flexibility.

A wave of his hand activated the holographic keyboard that beamed out of the centre of the deck. Another series of inputs raised a numeral pad to the right, and a series of viewing monitors projected out, beaming directly onto the open wall in front of him. These screens could be chopped and changed to show anything he wanted. Much better.

The first thing he did was tap into the police network. He ran an audio feed from the patrol units across the city, focusing on the all-purpose wide-band. Simultaneous to this he wrote a quick voice-parser program flagging words "missing" "person" "Rebecca" and "Pearson". Whenever these words went out over the central line, the conversation would be recorded, saved, and neatly packaged in an allocated folder of his choosing. That would keep the APD honest whilst Rashid did more digging on his own.

It took a few minutes to tap into the security feed of the camera systems overlooking the perimeter wall of the 'Zone. This proved to be less useful than originally hoped. Primarily because most of the inward facing cameras had been vandalised; either smashed in with rocks or spray-painted by particularly acrobatic vandals. He panned through, flipping from one camera to the next; cataloguing those which were useful, dismissing those that were not.

Another approach was called for, then.

Rashid needed visibility. A bird's eye perspective over the city, one that could inform him as to the geography in real time. Satellites were out: most having been decommissioned or taken off-line by private stakeholders in the wake of The Surge of '57. He would need something more localised, privately funded.

Then Rashid had an idea.

There were a herd of zeppelins circling the city; three or four of them at any given time. Advertising hoardings, primarily; held aloft by sophisticated grav-technology rather than any primitive form of gas propulsion. The majority of the blimps were simply a hollow frame to accommodate further ad space. Antiquated but charming; harmless really – a forgotten background detail in an otherwise normal skyline.

Perfect.

The airships ran slow circuits of the city; holo-projecting corporate brand slogans and sports logos. A lesser known fact was these zeppelins were bedecked with all manner of monitoring equipment. They tracked traffic patterns and crowd data; app usage and spending habits; the marketing information up for sale to the highest bidder.

Rashid decided to repurpose one for a more decidedly noble purpose now. The drogues were drone controlled, programmed to run automated, randomised patterns over the city, before returning to ground teams at the northern Starport for regular maintenance review. Few ever ventured as far west as the Refugee Zone, which in a city of vast inequality was deemed a non-essential market.

That was about to change.

Rashid pulled up the Waypoint page of one of the smaller blimps; registered to Vyrant Telecom. A communications giant, who primarily leased the blimp to subsidiary providers. Vyrant had massive wealth, together with a litany of employee rights issues that placed them right at the top of Rashid's ethical shit-list, so he didn't feel particularly guilty when he accessed their remote monitoring software, leased the blimp to one of their own subsidiaries, and diverted it from its original route entirely.

The display on the blimp shifted, showing one of the more affordable burner data pads you could get - a more prudent for of advertising, given his intended destination over the historically poor Western District. Rashid let the automated software handle the navigation, offering only the slightest course correction here and there. His disguise complete, he set his plan in motion.

Slow motion. Argjend was a vast city, and while the drogue was eye-catching, it was not known for its speed. Rashid was reticent to draw unwanted attention by having it exceed its usual speed. Night was falling as it steadily drifted through the fading sky, its running lights winking to life and blinking steadily. Rashid hopped from the Vyrant data page to the remote controlling server; leaping from there into the surveillance systems of the airship itself.

The array of cameras at his disposal made him cackle with delight in the quiet dark of the hospital room. It was a gold mine of monitoring software. He had to muffle himself, lest he attract the guards posted outside.

The surveillance kit of the advertising drogue wouldn't have been out of place in an infantry support drone. He had thermals, infrared; auto-detection protocols for individual citizens, four separate levels of magnification. Humanity had long since surrendered its privacy to the pervasive eye of the digital world. Anyone using their Chatter, browsing social media, making online purchases; they flashed up as little cards, revealing strands of web activity; leaving a trail which he could trace as long as his heart desired. The level of voyeurism was unseemly, were it not been so damn useful right now.

The only thing ensuring privacy these days was the sheer volume of data available. It was information overload. Rashid had to clear the perspective, to focus the inflow of information in a manner that he could actually digest. He imposed a series of filters, limiting the information provided to location markers and citizen I.D's. He kept the cameras continually orientated on the Refugee Zone. It drifted ever closer into view with agonising slowness. It was completely dark by the time it was in position. Cautiously, Rashid killed the lights on the advertising drogue, bathing it in darkness. It disappeared from the night sky, the grey metal hull blending seamlessly with the drifting clouds around it.

Rashid blinked. He was seeing harsh blurts of light on the low-light setting. It looked for the life of him like muzzle flashes. Rashid's fingers danced on the keyboard, the haptic feedback clicking as they moved. He zoomed the camera in, toggling the filter to show ident tags and a skeletal overlay of the meandering streets around them.

This high up, the footage was grainy, battered by atmospherics. Still, it was unmistakable.

It was muzzle fire. The entire region was caught up in a pitched battle, one without any particular rhyme or reason. Rashid saw a surges of crowd activity, bodies thickly packed. Widespread panic too. The ident-tags churned like static on a broken monitor. So many of them were place holder labels, showing as "undocumented, non-resident". These were the people fleeing the area where the fighting was thickest. Many of those at the centre of things were known only by their police records, which made for extensive reading. Rashid squinted closer, focusing on something else.

A third group, tightly coordinated, moving from building to building.

There were more men down there; black ants, scuttling in a coordinated hunting pattern. These men had no records at all.

Something drifted between the drogue's view and the battleground below. Rashid zoomed out, wave-snapped a recording of it onto a separate window. He stabbed a finger at it, initiating a short playback sequence. A negative outline of a ship, backlit by the sheer volume of ident-tags beneath it. Rashid recognised it at once.

A military Pelican: the silhouette was unmistakable. Running dark, no visible IFF marker of any kind. Rashid pulled the field of view wider, considering the entire region and context. There, to the north-east. A second one; again, no tags, no IFF.

Rashid calmly began recording the feed. Something was going on here, something nobody was meant to witness. He alone would bear witness. Rashid knew what it would be like ground side; the sound, the numbing fury of it all. Even without the thermal scan showing the cooling bodies, the number of tags which had ceased moving told him enough. He had front row tickets to a full blown massacre.

Up here it was all so serene; eerily so. Now he knew how the drone pilots felt.

Rashid adjusted the volume on the police dispatch. There was nothing on the principal communication line he'd been monitoring initially. This was the command line, where any major mention of Rebecca's Missing Persons complaint would crop up. He tabbed over to the general wideband for the Western District. The com exploded into life so loud he had to squelch the volume immediately. Panicked calls for emergency dispatch, urgent please for medical assistance and a crowd containment unit. A gamut of emotions: concern, frustration, fury, fear.

Rashid recorded this too. Something was amiss here. A civil disturbance of this scale ought to have triggered a city-wide lockdown. The absence of a definitive coordinated response was telling. Rashid was a skilled net operator, but couldn't find any signs of interception work in play. The only clue that it was going on at all was the prevailing inaction of those in command of the Western District.

The fighting continued. Rashid watched as scale of it faltered, dropping to isolated skirmishes here and there. The majority of citizens had fled the area, or had been slaughtered outright. The gangs too.

A proximity alert triggered on the drogue's sensors. Rashid pulled up the status report. Something had just ripped through the atmosphere at high speed, passing the airship as it descended through the cloud cover. Some kind of meteorite, based on the speed.

Rashid consulted a visual feed of the entire area. An object descending at considerable speed had impact one of the roof tops. The Spartan swivelled one of the cameras to focus on it. A large gaping hole had been dashed through the rooftop. A drop pod? No, too small. The impact crater would have been twice that size. More questions; more mysteries, heaped upon other mysteries. It was all happening so fast.

The fighting had slackened off in the past few minutes. The outlying gangs had retreated, bloodied and bruised; and there was a large vacuum, radiating out from a warehouse surrounded by more typical high stacks, so typical of the area. Difficult as it was, Rashid's eyes were sharp. He caught the spurt-flash of breaching charges, and then more reports of gunfire.

More figures flooded into the warehouse, and a frenzied firefight took place. Heavy beams of tracer fire tore the roof apart, tore up toward where the drogue itself drifted in the clouds. The tracers white-washed the feed for a moment. By the time the static-fizz cleared, the entire building was on fire. There was a wash of static, but Rashid saw them.

Four tags fled the building.

Three were nonsense; more "undocumented, non-resident" tags showed up. The fourth made him sit bolt upright in the bed.

Rebecca Pearson. Twenty nine years of age. Civilian contractor (suspended, pending review – DATA REDACTED). No mention of the Missing Persons report he'd filed four hours earlier.

Rashid scrutinised the way the people were fleeing. She did not appear to be restrained in any way. Indeed, the others were leading her. One of them was limping, badly. Rashid marked the three strangers in a particular colour, and hoping to track them later. They vanished under a covered market, some kind of hanging awning that blocked the drogue's sensors.

Rashid activated his com. It was almost 2am. Chidinma woke up on the fourth or fifth chime, her irritation vanishing once she heard the tone of Rashid's voice.

"Chidi, it's Rash. You're not going to believe this."

They spoke quickly. Rashid tabbed away from the drogue's visual display, collating the info and preparing it for immediate transmission.

He was still tabbed out when Damien's tiny figure emerged from the warehouse, and moved quietly out of sight of the drifting zeppelin high above.

The next morning, Rebecca's hands still shook. They had taken refuge in a storage unit on the very edge of the 'Zone, bathed in the shadows of the high pock-marked walls that ringed the ghetto from the wider civilisation beyond. Murphy had been leasing the unit via a dummy account for some time.

Rebecca wrinkled her nose in disgust. He couldn't have been paying very much for it. The walls were crude concrete block; long streaks of discolouration trickling down the brickwork where water damage had set in and been left to moulder. Lighting was sparse – a single exposed strip light, casting harsh shadows down around them; rendering their faces gaunt and skeletal. Emphasising just how worn out they really were.

Most of the adjoining lots were disused, and had been annexed by the homeless. They now housed burnt out oil drums and rotting mattresses; piled sleeping bags and carpets of discarded cans of all shapes and sizes. With EMT's distributing free medical aid on the other side of the district, there had barely been a soul around when Murphy unclipped the padlock, jerking the shutter upward with a rattling squeal.

Dominating the cramped space was a monstrous M12 FAV Warthog, its hulking wheels tight against the unit's walls. It was a civilian model, though not particularly luxurious compared to some of the ones you saw parading along the more exclusive neighbourhoods across the city. It was second hand, no-nonsense; dressed in a deep wine colour, and fitted with a roll cage and heavier grill guard that set it apart from its more fearsome military cousin. It looked every bit as battered as Rebecca felt. To the left of the unit was a long workbench, cluttered with all manner of survivalist supplies. Rebecca wondered just how many backup stashes like this one they had scattered across the city.

The shutter clanked down behind them, sealing them in. Watanabe helped Fenton into the passenger seat. The flight from the warehouse had taken its toll. He slumped in the seat, grey-faced and breathless; his shaggy beard matted to his face with sweat.

"We can't stay here. Not for long." Murphy was saying.

"He needs proper medical attention." Watanabe replied, rummaging through a first-aid kit on the work bench.

"He's undocumented. We all are." Murphy shook his head, "They bring him to a medical facility, there's no telling where he could end up. Becker has eyes everywhere."

"I'll be fine." Fenton croaked, before descending into a fit of ragged coughing.

Murphy waggled a disapproving finger at him.

"Don't even try that stoic shite with me. The last time you went that colour, I pulled an unexploded needler shard from your arse. Took the docs six weeks to regrow the lumps they took out of you."

"See?" Fenton's chuckle triggered a raw bout of coughing, "Walk in the park by comparison."

The two men bumped knuckles. Rebecca found herself a perch on another cargo crate. She sat heavily, the strength vanishing from her legs as the adrenaline seeped away. Her hands had developed a palsied shake, one she could not stop.

"You okay?" Watanabe asked, hunkering down beside her; offering a comforting shoulder squeeze. "You did well back there."

"Who are you people?" Rebecca looked up, expression pale, "Who were these men? Why were they after us?"

Murphy took it upon himself to answer. He was busy running checks on the 'Hog's engine, testing the water levels; ensuring the conversion core was running smoothly. He took a moment to step aside, one hand resting on the popped bonnet.

"They weren't after us, Dr. Pearson. They were after you." Murphy began, "Or more specifically, whatever the hell it was that's on that antique box of yours."

"You were the ones following me at the Market?"

"Us and half the city, from the looks of it. 'Zoners got to you first, but credits for cashews that kill team ordered the intercept."

"Gang leader got the call." Fenton agreed, nodding "Took it pretty seriously too, from the way they told us to roll out."

Murphy clanged the bonnet of the 'Hog shut. The man was filthy, his skin covered in soot from where breaching charges had detonated, and the ash-smoke from the burning walls had stained his ragged clothing with a murky grime. He looked at Rebecca, expression frank.

"You asked who we are. I can't say, not officially. We're working for an old contact of yours, Eric-239. We've been on station for twelve weeks, working deep cover within the Refugee Zone. We'd been informed that a rogue operative was operating out of Argjend; one who could be tied to the destruction of New Cadiz six months ago. Our job was to investigate reported connections, and await further instructions."

Murphy leaned back against the car, hands spread.

"So we split it two ways. I stayed loose, keeping an ear to the ground and reporting to Eric directly. Fenton and 'Tan here had the harder job, working muscle for the local gangs."

"We still don't know the extent of their involvement," Watanabe grimaced.

"Some of the shit we had to do." Fenton added ruefully.

Murphy began taking an inventory of their remaining weapons, setting them out on the workbench. It didn't take long. They had precious little ammunition left. Half a mag for the DMR, and perhaps a mag each for the smaller side-arms. Watanabe's machine pistol was entirely spent, and she'd discarded the scattergun during their exfiltration of the warehouse. She had needed both hands to carry Fenton.

"There's a lot going on in this city, more than the civilian government knows about." Murphy spared a look over his shoulder, "Look, I know what I'm saying isn't exactly comforting. But better to be up front."

"And the men chasing us?" Rebecca asked.

"That I can talk about. Our target. Former special-forces group, designation Black Shard. A wet works outfit, drawn from selected elements of the Beta-V teams that were active back in the 2540's. Their leader is something of a legend in the intelligence community, a myth even. Elias Becker." The word was half-spat, "He's been AWOL for two years, but we have strong reason to believe he's here on Granica V, pursuing an agenda that is as yet unknown. ONI wants him tracked down and contained."

"Contained?"

Murphy's grave look told Rebecca everything she needed to know about his interpretation of the word. Then she thought of something.

"Rashid. Back during the fighting in New Cadiz, he identified men that were evidently ex-special forces" Rebecca said, "Do you think they had something to do with the Insurrectionist's collapse of Orbital Two?"

Murphy mulled this over.

"Difficult to say. We know Black Shard had been active in the New Cadiz theatre; that much is certain. And it takes considerable knowledge and demolitions ability to bring down an orbital tether. That, or a CCS Battlecruiser. I don't doubt the Innies had the resources, but they were trying to seize the city, not destroy it."

"I'd agree with that." Fenton said, "They lost the fight in a single stroke once it came down. Doesn't strike me as a winning strategy."

"But what would Black Shard stand to gain in destroying a city?" Watanabe asked, "What could they possibly have hoped to achieve?"

"Beats the shit out of me." Murphy shrugged.

"So what's our next move?" Rebecca asked. Her hands were calmer now, but for the occasional flutter.

"Get out of the 'Zone, for starters. This is No Man's Land. Becker can strike here with an impunity. We need to get you to a safe location, and I can't think of a worse place to be than this hole."

"That's part one of the plan." Fenton agreed.

"And part two?" Rebecca asked.

This time it was Watanabe who answered. She was busy removing the various knots and braids in her hair. Gang markings, ones she was evidently glad to be rid of. There was a small pile of discarded rings and cheap necklaces strewn around on the ground before her. Surely but steadily, she began to resemble a soldier again, albeit a filthy one.

"Part two is we find a means of accessing the data on that disc." Watanabe said, "They were prepared to tear this place apart to secure it. It's our job to find out why."

"Getting out of here's not going to be easy." Fenton warned, "There's going to be check-points, a full lockdown. Probably martial law in the city beyond, at least until the situation is contained."

"Have it covered." Murphy said brightly, crossing back over to the packing crate Rebecca was sitting on. "Uh, I'll need to move you there, Doctor."

Rebecca stood up, stepping aside. Murphy unclasped the seals of the crate, popping it open. Inside were clean uniforms, neatly pressed and folded. Rebecca recognised them immediately from her visits to Rashid in the hospital.

"Congratulations, Dr. Pearson," Murphy grinned, "Now's your chance to be a real doctor."