The sharp crackle of gunfire ripped through the air, each shot a violent jolt that echoed, a metallic shriek vibrating deep in her chest, the acrid smell of burnt propellent stinging her nostrils. Above Adi’s head, the ferrocrete wall shatters under the assault, sending a gritty spray of pulverized dust and sharp fragments stinging into the air.

"Fuck me!"

She dives, the rough texture of the earth scraping against her skin as she slams into the ground. A sharp, metallic tang fills the air, and a sickening crunch echoes in her ears, instantly telling her something is terribly wrong.

Not armor-deep. Past it. The round must have entered at an awkward angle, struck her subdermal plating in the side, resulting in heat and pressure building in her lower left abdomen. A ricochet probably struck her.

“Shit,” she muttered, and moved despite the pain, her breath sharp and controlled.

She dragged herself behind an abandoned bulk loader as another burst hammered the space she had just occupied. The agonizing shriek of metal, a sound so sharp it made her teeth ache, echoed through the air. Bullets ricocheted off the loader's thick metal plating, striking the walls and ground. Chendiurian ochre dust rained down.

Her hand came away wet and sticky when she pressed it to her side, blood already working its way through her clothes. She smelled the sharp, distinct, metallic, coppery scent of her blood.

No time.

Adi reached for her war belt on instinct. The titanium-alloy cased Myrmidon IFAK came free in one smooth motion, scarred and heavy, built to survive the kind of day that kills other people. Clenching her teeth, she pried it open with one hand as the sharp supersonic crack of bullets zipped past; the air vibrating with their rush, narrowly missing her.

She peeled back her jacket and haptic layer just enough to see the wound with a small mirror from her IFAK. Small entry. Probably a big mess underneath.

"Fuck."

A jagged shard, or perhaps a mangled projectile, is in her side. The wound wept a viscous, dark fluid, a chilling crimson that seemed to pulse with a malevolent hunger. She felt a hot, sticky sensation against her skin, as if the wound is actively yearning for her demise.

Pressure first.

After tearing open the package with her teeth, she slapped a Smart Trauma Fabric Band over the wound and felt it bite down, tightening as it sensed the injury. Pain briefly flares bright and hot, but the bleeding slowed. Not stopped. Slowed. As the pain blocker in the band took effect, the sharp sting of pain dissolved into a dull, throbbing ache that resonated beneath her skin.

“Good enough,” she growled.

She dug deeper into the kit, fingers moving fast, precise. Auto-injector. Clotting accelerators paired with synthetic platelets with some mild painkillers. She jams the injector into her thigh, the sharp poly case cool against her hand. With a decisive click that echoed in the muted lull, she triggered the release. Cold spread through her veins.

Boots scraped on debris. Voices carried through the smoke. They’re moving up, confident, thinking she’s pinned or bleeding out. They're about to be fucking surprised.

Adi pulled a wound seal from the kit and pressed it over the smart bandage, palms slick with blood. The seal adhered and stiffened, locking everything in place. The ache deepened, a dull throb like a trapped drumbeat, steady and mean. It’s contained, a tight knot in her gut, like a stone settled in the pit of her stomach. For now.

She snapped her IFAK shut and clipped it back onto her belt, breath coming hard but controlled. A dull ache, like a persistent whisper, throbbed, its icy tendrils testing her resolve. It sought to shrink her world, a suffocating gray cloud threatening to engulf her vision. Not today.

She drew her pistol, checked the magazine by feel, and shifted her weight despite the protest from her side. She holstered her pistol and checked her wound. Blood still seeps beneath the seal, warm against her skin, but it isn’t pouring anymore. She drew both kukris from behind her on her war belt.

They rounded the loader, one of them already grinning, muzzle coming up too slow. Adi rose to meet him, jaw set, breath steady, held together by grit, training, and borrowed time.

Under fire, half-patched up and pissed off, she moved because stopping has never been part of her plan. She could tell from their brief hesitation that they did not expect her to move so fast. They assumed her wound had taken her out of the fight. 

"Surprise motherfuckers," she shouted as she leaped into their midst.

The shooting stopped the way it always does; suddenly, and for the wrong reasons.

Adi sat on an abandoned, gray, poly shipping crate in the loader's shadow, back against warm metal, boots planted wide so she doesn’t tip over. The wound in her side throbbed in a slow, deliberate rhythm, as if it’s taking notes.

Blood soaked through the seal just enough to remind her she’s still on borrowed time. The field medic dropped to a knee in front of her without a word. Fleet Marine medics joked that their survival time during an ambush was equivalent to a grenade's fuse, lasting only three to five seconds.

With a heavy thud that echoed slightly in the quiet alley, he dropped his worn, slightly scuffed Unit One beside her, the faint scent of old plastic, webbing, and circuitry momentarily filling the air. 

A medic's Unit One contained a full range of field medical supplies, including bandages, gauze, wound treatments, blood products, pain relief auto-injectors, antibiotic creams, and more. 

His name is Elias Nivaldo-Domantas. Born on Mars of Brazilian and Lithuanian descent. She can't remember which city. Mars Terrestrial Army, medical corps, twelve years before he decided the uniform wasn’t worth the lies anymore. Exhausted from maintaining a facade of normalcy when the underlying situation is deteriorating. Tired of being processed instead of being seen.

Or he grew weary of supporting an organization that promoted individuals beyond their competent roles. He’s lean, of average height, fair-skinned, shaved head, heavy dark brown Van Dyke beard, deep brown eyes that don’t flinch anymore because they learned that trick the hard way.

Familiar with death, mangled bodies, and the loss of friends, Adi had grown accustomed to it. She felt that way until she lost Mike.

“Don’t move,” he said, voice flat, already peeling back Adi’s jacket.

“Wasn’t planning on it,” Adi replied drily.

Elias’s hands are steady as he exposes the wound. The seal did its job, barely. Underneath, the pressure band, soaked and swollen, stretched close to its tolerance limit. He ran a beeping med-scanner over her wound, exhaling through his nose as he checked his medical tablet, its scarred back marked with the centuries-old red cross symbol that identifies medical personnel.

“Fuck,” he muttered. “You were millimeters.”

Adi watched his face instead of looking at the wound. Medics don’t lie with their eyes. He pulled a common medic protein bar out and handed it to her along with a warm, sealed bottle of water.

“How close?” She inquired, having chugged half of the near body temp water. She looked at the nutrient bar's label. It's familiar to her. While it fuels the body, it doesn't feed the soul. She ripped the bar's wrapper open with her teeth.

Elias doesn’t answer immediately. He looked at his medical tablet, tapping on it a few times. He probes gently around the injury, fingers precise and professional. A hiss escaped Adi before she could stop it.

“Close. Round came in at an angle,” he said. “Skipped along your subdermal armor's inner edge. Fragments missed your kidney by maybe a finger width." Elias looked at his tablet again. "Any deeper and you’d have bled out right after you hit the ground.”

Adi shrugged and winced when it pulled at her wound. "Fucking high frag rounds. The Colonial Marine recruiter said that I'd undertake novel tasks, encounter the unimaginable, and observe the incredible, leading to complete fatigue yet a desire to persist, anticipating a repeat of the experience."

"Sounds like a fucking recruiter. You're fortunate it wasn't an armor piercing or explosive round. Or had nanite-driven fragments heading for your heart and or brain. War drives tech. It’s an ancient fact."

"Yay. Lucky me." 

She learned that hope in institutional settings was a weakness the system exploited, so she practiced not seeming too hopeful. He turned his gaze to her then, genuinely looking.

“You run around like that in the Corps? Their leadership is characterized by action, not just words."

“No,” Adi said. “The Corps had better equipment, timing and more people.”

Elias snorted quietly. “Yeah. That tracks.”

Behind him, the third member of the job leaned against the wall, lighting a cigarette with hands that still shook. Her name is Maribel “Brick” de la Santos. Station rat of Spanish and North American Commonwealth descent. Former Mars space dockside rigger. No formal military background, just augmented muscle, grit, and a habit of surviving things she shouldn’t.

Brick’s bleeding from a nasty wound in her scalp, but she is upright and functional. The dark red blood sliding down her face contrasts with her light olive complexion and shoulder-length, straight midnight-dark hair.

Brick exhaled tobacco, cloves, and marijuana-scented purple smoke. She looked at the surrounding wreckage.

“So, chica,” she said, her hazel eyes flinty. “Tell me again why Kane wanted this data node intact?”

"No fucking clue, Brick. He just wanted it and offered enough credits through Rat to make me get it."

The Mars credit, a digital currency backed by corporations, was the most prevalent. Better than trillions of credits in some digital shitcoin. Empty corporate bullshit that mistook effort for productive output.

This job was supposed to be simple. Rat sold it that way; that should have been the first fucking warning.

She sat still while Elias tended her wound. Adi remembered the words of an ancient Marine named Sledge she had to memorize while in training on Parris Island: "War is brutish, inglorious, and a terrible waste. The only redeeming factors were my comrades’ incredible bravery and their devotion to each other. Marine Corps training taught us to kill efficiently and to try to survive. But it also taught us loyalty to each other and love. That esprit de corps sustained us."

She glanced at the bodies of other mercs. Probably hired by someone with more credentials than sense. Chendiuria's slums are full of the young and stupid. Affluenza affects the wealthy. The slum dwellers who survived stopped being stupid. The ones who don’t? They stopped being young.

I did not intend this conflict, Adi thought. The job was to extract a hardened data core from a decommissioned municipal relay hub on the industrial edge of First City.

Old infrastructure. Old security. Quiet in, quiet out. She should have fucking known better. In her world, peace had a shelf life measured in days if she was lucky, minutes if it was just another Tuesday.

Kane wanted whatever was still buried in the node before a rival fixer could get their hands on it. She didn't realize that the oppo would send trigger happy mercs with cold, dead eyes to get the node from her team. They got the node. They failed to exit cleanly.

Someone else had the same idea and better timing. A three-man merc crew hit the site mid-extraction, heavier weapons, no interest in negotiation. The fight destroyed the relay hub and killed two opposing merc crew members. Adi left their bodies in pieces.

Their third member lies face down, bleeding out from the stumps of his arms. Dying wasn't instant. It was messy and ugly. Adi doesn't know where his arms went after she chopped them off in a single slash. His helmet bears a large angular dent from the back of Adi's kukri.

An instructor once noted that your treatment of deceased persons reveals more regarding your character than your interactions with contemporaries. But Adi learned the logistics of reality. Adi's team will be long gone before the Robbies and the meat wagon arrive. They maintained their position until Brick concluded the core removal. That part worked. Everything else went to shit.

Elias finished stabilizing her wound, injecting a secondary clotting agent with mild pain blockers. She's thankful that the design of modern drugs includes interaction with neural implants.

She winced and hissed as Elias reinforced the wound's seal. His hands paused for just a second longer than necessary.

“You should’ve been evac’d,” he said quietly.

Adi shrugged, careful not to pull at the injury. “No evac on a Rat job.”

Elias nodded. He knew that rule.

“Still,” he added, “next time you try that, you’re going to lose.”

Head-on was Adi's sole trusted direction.

Brick flicked ash onto the ground. “She's still standing, doc.”

Elias stood and stepped back, giving Adi space. “Barely, Mary.”

He met her eyes again, something like respect mixed with concern.

“You're out of the Colonial Corps, right?” he asked.

She nodded. “Not quite a year.”

“Figured,” he replied. “Only fucking ex-Colonial Marines run into incoming fire like they’re bullet proof immortal.”

Adi huffed a weak laugh. “Yeah. Turns out I’m not. Had to do something. Fuckers had us pinned good.”

Brick crushed her cigarette under her boot. “Job’s a fucking wash,” she said. “Data’s good, but the noise we made? Kane’s gonna call this a success with a fucking asterisk.”

A Pyrrhic victory, then. They got what Kane wanted. They lost the element of anonymity, and they almost lost Adi. Elias slung his pack over his shoulder and gestured toward the alley mouth.

“Can you walk?” he asked.

Adi pushed herself up, slow and deliberate. The world tilted, but she kept her feet.

“Yeah,” she said. “I can fucking walk.”

Elias watched her for a long second.

“Next time,” he said, “don’t cut it that close. You're fucking lucky they weren't prepared for you to charge them wielding a pair of kukris screaming like a fucking crazy woman. You're fucking scary in CQC.”

"What he said, chica," Brick said, wincing as Elias tended to her head wound.

Adi met Brick's gaze, tired and hurt but unbroken.

“There’s always a next time,” she said. “That’s the problem.”

"Come on Mary," he said. "Later, I need to get a better look at that head wound of yours."

"Sure flaquito."

They moved out into the night, three survivors from a job that should have killed them, none of them quite ready to admit how close it came.

Adi felt the wound pulse as she walked. A quiet reminder. She’s not invincible. Not yet.

Later, somewhere else in the city, Markus Kane got his data and marked the operation down as acceptable losses. Kane reviewed the footage alone. That’s deliberate.

The ops room was dim, and the walls displayed slow-scrolling telemetry and security cam angles that Rat swore he had scrubbed clean from a dozen sources. Kane doesn’t trust swears. He trusts patterns, margins, and how close something comes to falling apart.

Adi bleeds on-screen. Not dramatically. No heroic slow motion. Just a hard, ugly hit followed by movement that doesn’t stop when it should. She dragged herself into cover, self-treated under fire, and finished the job anyway.

He shook his head as he watched Adi draw both kukris and charge the opposing mercs. In less than a minute Adi killed two of the mercs, removing one's legs and vertically bisecting the other.

"Fucking nasty. That's just mean Adi."

The last merc had barely turned when Adi's kukri slashed through both arms, removing them mid-biceps. With the back of her blade, she dropped the armless merc with a vicious blow to his helmet. The merc fell as if he were a puppet whose strings Adi had sliced.

Kane double checked the time. Fuck. Adi tore through three heavily armed mercs in under a minute. He had heard she was a superb CQC fighter. He just saw proof of her prowess.

Kane paused the feed on a single frame. Adi, seated on a crate afterward. Pale. Jaw tight. Still upright because stubbornness is doing the work her body can’t.

He exhaled through his nose. “That’s too close,” he muttered to the empty room.

The job itself is a qualified success. Data core extracted. Rival crew neutralized or dead. Collateral damage acceptable by Rat’s standards. By Kane’s, it’s a warning shot.

He pulled up the medical overlay that Rat’s people scraped from the aftermath. Estimated blood loss. Time-to-failure projections. Probability curves.

She should have died. Not guaranteed. Not clean. But close enough that Kane doesn’t like how the numbers cluster.

He leaned back; the chair creaking softly, and brought up a second secure channel. This one is older. Deeper. Buried under layers of shell companies and plausible deniability.

The consortium calls itself the Helix Accord. Publicly, it doesn’t exist. Privately, it’s a marriage of convenience: the Lazarus Consortium with its black budgets and colder math; the Chendiurian Security Directive Initiative operating off-books and off-record; and a loose syndicate of wealthy Chendiurian interests, casino magnates, resort developers, venue owners, people who understand that the difference between a backwater colony and a destination is one discovery, timed correctly.

The fossil sits in a secure vault beneath Kane’s house. The first proof. A thing that will rewrite trade routes, funding priorities, and planetary relevance overnight. And it needs to get to BuCol. Mars first. Bureau of Colonies custody. Official chain of discovery. Clean hands. Clean story.

Kane brings up the courier file. The original pick. Carefully built profile. Clean biometrics. No military history to raise flags. Good reflexes, decent stress tolerance, motivated by money and anonymity. A single word now stamps the file. Failed.

The reason remains unsettled. Kane hasn’t decided whether it was fear, greed, pressure, or a mistake so small it only mattered once. All he knows is that the courier didn’t survive the vetting. Perhaps he overcame it proficiently, disclosing what he ought not to reveal.

Either way, the slot is empty. Except it isn’t. Kane looks back at Adi on-screen. Ex-Marine. Myrmidon. Excessively noticeable. Too honest. Too bad at pretending she’s not exactly what she is. Backup option. That was her intended purpose. A contingency.

Now Kane watches her take a round she shouldn’t survive and keep moving anyway, held together by discipline and an IFAK that barely buys her enough time to stay upright. He rubbed his face with one hand.

“Fuck,” he murmured.

The Helix Accord wanted a courier. What they’re going to get is a problem that needs engineering.

He opens a new folder. Upgrade pathways. Augmentation trees. Medical waivers that no sane ethics board would sign. Black-market acquisition routes. Corporate espionage vectors that point uncomfortably close to Lazarus internal vaults.

Kane knows what this means. Once he starts down this road, Adi stops being a fallback and starts being an investment. A prototype. A liability with a balance sheet. He doesn’t like that. He likes it less that he’s going to do it, anyway.

Because the arm doesn’t care about guilt. BuCol doesn’t care about close calls. And the Helix Accord didn’t put billions of credits and political capital on the table to watch a courier bleed out in an alley over a data node.

Kane rewinds the footage one last time. Adi stands up when she shouldn’t be able to. He nods once; the decision settling into place like a locked bolt.

“Alright,” he says quietly. “We do it properly.”

Somewhere beneath the house, the fossil waits in the dark. And Kane plans to turn Adi into something that can survive carrying it.

Several months ago ...

The room is quiet. Not because anyone is afraid to speak. Because everyone understands the stakes.

A holographic rendering of the fossil slowly rotates above the conference table. No one looks away from it for long. Finally, one of the resort developers breaks the silence.

"If Mars gets that..."

He doesn't finish. He doesn't need to. The woman possessing three casino complexes, positioned opposite him, does.

"They'll never leave." She feared, not unreasonably, that she’ll lose her status and wealth. She didn't want to return to calculating interest payments in her head while deciding which meals she could skip.

An SDI colonel folds his hands.

"No. They won't. They'll arrive as scientists and then as inspectors. Then Bureau officials. Then Mars Fleet Marines to protect the scientists."

He let the words settle.

"Laws follow uniforms. We already have the problem of justice only existing for people who have the right connections to buy it. A Mars occupation would make it worse."

A Lazarus representative speaks next. His calm voice is unsettling.

"The Bureau of Colonies possesses emergency authority under the Colonial Preservation Act. Let me quote an ancient Green: 'The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.'"

The casino owner nodded. "They'll classify the entire basin. No mining and no drilling. No independent expeditions and no private ownership. They'll own the future."

One of the venue owners shook his head. "They won't own it. They'll regulate it." The distinction earned a humorless smile. "Which is worse."

Kane has remained silent. Until now. You learn more in the lion’s den than at the lion’s funeral. Kane wonders what a lion was.

"You all need to understand something."

Every eye turned toward him.

"You're assuming Mars is the enemy."

Nobody answered.

"You're wrong."

He nodded toward the fossil.

"The enemy is not whoever gets that first."

A profound silence settled, so deep it felt like a physical weight. The air hung still and heavy, muffling any potential sound. It was the silence that pressed in on his ears, a vast, empty canvas where only the sound of his own heartbeat seemed to echo. Kane continued.

"If BuCol gets it first..." He pointed toward Mars on the holographic system map. "...the discovery belongs to humanity." His finger shifts toward Chendiuria. "If someone else gets it first..." Another pause. "...it belongs to whoever can keep everyone else away."

The Lazarus representative spoke. "That may prove problematic."

The SDI colonel nodded slowly. "So we're choosing the lesser empire."

"No." Kane's voice is almost tired. "We're choosing the only one that publishes its science publically."

That landed. Because everyone in the room knows the shadowy Lazarus Consortium has no interest in publishing. Neither do the corporations. Neither do half the governments in settled space. BuCol does. Eventually.

The casino owner leaned back. "So what are we paying for?"

Kane looked directly at her.

"Because once BuCol confirms the fossil isn't a hoax..."

He let the hologram rotate once more.

"...Chendiuria stops being a forgotten backwater desert colony."

The room is silent. Then the resort developer smiles.

"They'll build a larger and better space elevator. Maybe a couple of them."

Other voices overlapped.

"Hotels."

"Universities."

"Research campuses."

"Orbital shipyards."

"Fleet bases."

The SDI colonel finished the thought. "And every major power in human space will suddenly care what happens here."

Kane nodded once. "Exactly."

The Helix Accord is not united because everyone wants to prevent Mars from gaining influence. They're united because they all believe that if the fossil does not go to BuCol, something much worse happens.

Each faction has a different reason:

• Kane believes scientific openness is the least dangerous outcome.
• The Lazarus Consortium wants first access to BuCol's research and the leverage that comes with being the discoverer.
• The SDI wants Mars invested in Chendiuria's security because a strategically important colony is harder for rival powers to destabilize.
• The casino owners, resort developers, and business interests see the fossil as Chendiuria's economic salvation. If Mars suddenly pours money into research, transportation, infrastructure, hotels, universities, and tourism, its fortunes will multiply.

Shared ideals don't form the basis of the Helix Accord. It's built on overlapping self-interest.