September 3, 2073,

Five hours after we returned from the bad mission, I found myself sitting in the window of the dilapidated 8th street apartment staring down night life.

I couldn’t sleep again.

It wasn’t the dank little apartment that oddly smelled like a teenage boy’s gaming den. And, sure, it wasn’t my parents’ place up north, hell it wasn’t even the place I stayed outside of town when I was in school, but I could adjust. Ops always made me restless, more so when they were as sloppy as this one. So, I slipped out of bed, stole smoke from Kāne and was just watching the sparks cascaded down toward the street with each flick of my fingers.

“Oh, so dramatically gloomy.” I laughed shakily at myself.

I was trying to distract myself from the bloodshed and wasted lives, but the images from the drones were on repeat in head. The Marine Corporation, a subsidiary security company. for Vision Dynamics, must have had a new augmentation. They’d never been that quick, or well-armed. Violence of action was our game, but it was like they were ready.

“Freaking ninja’s. That’s the only thing that can explain it. They are freaking ninjas,” I muttered.

Kāne needed this mission to go right, and as my partner, if he needed something, I needed it. So, even though he’d been an ass for the past couple months, we hit the mega corporation’s research labs. I’d gone through the intelligence myself, made the plan. It should have been an in and out case. Simple.

Synthetically alert, I checked the hardware for the twentieth time that night. All our remaining weapons were laid out on the faux wood nightstand. All standardized and orderly, except Kāne’s SIG M17 Combat Pistol.

I could still smell the cloyingly sweet burnt Cordite v2 that lingered on its surface, or maybe that, like the copper smell of blood, it was just in my head.

The pistol had a Stream Light optic system mounted on Picatinny rail, and it sat just on top of the whole layout looking out of place, but dangerous.

It was designed for engaging multiple targets in a hostile environment. It was an Operator’s weapon, and Kāne’s pride and joy. I was surprised he wasn’t sleeping with it under his pillow.

“Oh sure, you rest, I’ll do the dishes and make you a sandwich for later,” I said to his back, not that I would do either.

On the table were two rows of magazines, each had a loop of 550 cord taped onto the end with green duct tape, or black electrical tape indicating their load. Black for explosive round, green full metal jacketed ball ammo like in the old days. Though now there was mostly black left after he used most of the ball ammo on the corporate security goons, The Marine Corporation, during the operation.

I paused and straightened everything out. Kāne liked things to be in order, and things had gone sour enough without adding to his irritation. I felt like he blamed me for the mission, but how could I account for those soldiers?

“What the hell would Ninjas be doing in Boise?” I complained, though part of me was wondering just how right I might be on that account.

Boise Idaho was trending toward a micro-version of Silicon Valley since the 1990s. Eventually, it developed into the alpha test site for most of north America’s emerging tech. Which meant nerds with too much disposable income became a huge market for vice merchants and the black market. No wonder Kāne like tactical weapons so much.

My own armament wasn’t as professional. The Governor .410-45 was an old model, primarily a gimmick gun that normally had no real practical applications. But, with the proto-type guided drone deployment cartridge options, it suited me well enough for the job. Five shots, and I had 15 micro-drones in the air each with their own explosive payload that could take a man’s head off.

All I needed to control the battlefield was a few drones in the air, my First-Person View Goggles, with Integrated Fire Control Systems. Or as we just called them FPVs, and few flash bang/pepper ball grenades. But I still didn’t understand why Rooker had only sent two of us on the op.

Kāne was top-notch, but like he was always telling me I had a lot to learn. Operational officer was a new gig for me, and I preferred being in my optics running drones, not busting in doors, but like everyone I was trained for it.

Glancing at the FPVs, I considered gearing up for the exchange, but the weight they put on my forehead and cheeks seemed cumbersome and pointless in the little apartment. I needed some neuro-lens. Neuro-lens were something I could wear and forget, but like anything useful, those would be expensive.

I’d spent all my money in the attempt to cheer up Kane. Expensive dinners, clubs, food, drugs, whatever it took. He was more than a partner. He was my other half. I hated seeing him in pain, even if he often took it out on me. You’re there for your other half, even when things are rough.

The Sertra I’d scored earlier in the evening had me strung tight and feeling hypervigilant, at least jumpy. But with the effects winding down I was feeling the ache in my jaw from the teeth clenching, and a rusty wire sensation that ran through my nerves. I didn’t think I could even handle the aggravation of the lightweight goggles.

“I thought I left the headgear back the orthodontists,” I laughed, remembering the years of discomfort I dealt with from even the more advanced devices.

Somewhere in the distance a Cummings Diesel raged at the night. I could just bet it had an American Flag in tatters on the back. Southern Idaho still has its share of wannabe rebels and Saturday night militia members letting the Outsiders know how tough they were. Something never changed.

“DIB,” Kāne stated without looking up from his spot on the bed.

“What?” I said with more surprise than I intended to let on.

Kāne looked over at me, his eyes followed my curves like the lips of a lover. The yellow light from the cheap hotel halogen bulbs gave his tanned skin a green completion that set off his Islander tattoos on his impressive chest. I’d felt that chest, he’d felt my curves, but I was no longer sure where we stood in our relationship. Things had been tense since his daughter, Zeta, was taken by the Courts and handed over to Vision Dynamics. But then again, things with Kane had always been intense. It’s what drew me to him, his passion, his fire. As the old saying goes, the bright flames burn the fastest.

“Drug Induced Buxom,” he said with a little roll of his eyes.

Kāne Seok was impressive. With a dark allure and intensity that often took my breath away. Pacific Islander, and Korean, he cut quiet a dashing figure with his mane of brown hair, and the facial hair that only enhanced his looks. Like a lion in his den, Kāne was perfectly at home no matter where he was.

“Excuse me, my Buxom is all natural,” I said, pushing out by chest while hoping he noticed my braless allure.

“I’m pretty sure everything about you is natural, or supernatural,” Kane rolled his eyes and sat up.

He might have been the former leader of one of the most notorious street gangs in the city, the Bucket List Boys, but he never appeared trashy. He was just a thrill-seeking extreme sports nut turned criminal more because of the circumstances of the street, then any real intent to.

I was thrilled when he asked me to partner up with him three years ago, more so when we became lovers. A mentor, a lover and friend.

“Is that another 20s TV show reference? You’ve been hanging around with Beto too much, it’s like talking to the ghosts of social media’s past,” I said.

“Buxom, It’s a form of Tardive dyskinesia. You know, uncontrolled movements of the mandible and lips,” he said in smooth but clipped tones that mimicked an announcer from one of those sleezy lawsuit farm commercials.

Then tossing another cigarette in my direction.

“I’m glad to see you’re awake. We meet for the exchange in about an hour near Rhode’s Abbey Park,” I said, and slipped off the window seal, went to put on some pants. The gray panties and wife beater didn’t leave me shy around Kane, or any of the team for that matter, you see a lot more on long deployments, but it was time to get myself together.

“You called Rooker? I asked you to let me do the calls. That op went south because your plan wasn’t executable, so just try to focus, and let me do the thinking from now on.” He growled and involuntarily I flinched.

"Fratrem meum in aeternumce," I muttered, and Kane shot me a glare.

"Fuck that, Forever my bothers keeper bull shit. It's just you and me Abbs, Rooker never has, and never will be looking after any interests but his own! So just stow that crap and focus for a change!"

I was focused. I was always focused, my problem was a lack of information, but my focus. But I let that slid, he’d been harsh before, but this mission had him really on edge. I would have been on edge too if it were my daughter. If he was my world, then his daughter was his, and I felt much the same. Zita was beyond precious.

The operation I planned wasn’t the op we ran. We were supposed to go in quiet and leave quiet. I'd run the drones, and back up Kane, but Kane had his own philosophy. I’d expected some minor amounts of questioning when we presented our fake credentials, but Kane didn’t like questions.

“You have to plan for everything, and now who sounds like a 20s sitcom stereo-type? Ninjas?”

His blood-shot brown eyes were on me again. Something in them, maybe a deformation in his lens or perhaps some tech at the back of his eye I wasn’t aware of, caught the light. With a glance, he took me in and caught the overt signs of the drugs I’d taken.

“I don’t care if the military used to give you the stuff or not, it’s not good for you. You are going to end up like all those old vets down at the veteran’s hall, stoned or drunk off your ass all the time. A few hours in bed would’ve done you some good. You look like shit.”

That also stung, but decided it was his nerves.

Gosh Kāne, you want me in bed?” I teased and tried to break the tension as I pushed a sickle of raven black hair from my eyes.

“Yes,” he huffed out a laugh. “But the last time we got skin to skin, I ended up with Beto’s knife to my throat,” he said with a lazy smile, then glanced around the room. “Where’s the tech?”

I dipped my chin towards his feet, then looked back into his eyes and grinned. “Rooker didn’t much care for you back then, and Beto just had your back, you know Rooker would have kicked your ass if you’d left bruises. Besides, you were drunk and rough.”

We both knew that was an understatement. Kāne’s affection landed me with a black eye and a bloody mouth. On the upside since that day, he stopped drinking, but we’d been on unstable ground ever since. He was no longer the wild party boy I’d fallen for, but the dangerous side of him was all too present.

Kāne glanced down as well and spotted the handle to the protective case, “There’s the payday.” He said and pulled it free and placed it on the nightstand.

“Rooker still doesn’t like me, Abby.” He grumbled, as he popped the tabs and looked down at the shimming container of metallic looking fluid inside.

“He just needs me for the muscle. Hell, if I didn’t need the pay for Zita’s school, I would have quit over that knife incident.”

“We all love your muscles, but he chilled out once he saw your sensitive side. He just didn’t know you, just your rep. No one thinks about a bad boy being such a teddy bear with kids,” I did my best to flash him a smile.

I decided not to mention that we had both been blind drunk and he was choking me at the time. “Do you think they will surrender her in exchange for the tech?” I asked.

“It’s that or I go to the cops with it.” Kāne said with steel in his voice.

“I won’t let Vision Dynamics have my daughter. Even it means starting a war.”

Closing the lid of the case, but leaving it unlatched, Kāne’s mind seemed to drift for a second as he thought about Zita. Kāne was always talking about that kid, and perhaps that’s why I loved him so much. If he was half as devoted to me as he was to Zita, I’d never need anything else.

Zita was special. Not the kind of special that put you on the short bus either, the kind that put a twelve-year-old into Stanford, kind of special. Now at 15 she was a full PHD in computer science with a focus on engineering.

I’d met the girl a few times, and she quickly became like a puppy I couldn’t shake off at unit functions. I didn’t mind, but I really had no idea what to do with the girl. She was quiet and kind of awkward. She was just there, if mostly silent. I think I would have liked her even if I wasn’t hot on Kāne back then.

Shaking his head, he sat down next the cases and popped the clasps, then I saw his eyes dart toward the window.

“Yeah, well, your call might have messed things up. There was a reason I wanted you to let me handle it. They might be watching Rooker’s phone. You’ll need to stay here now. I can’t risk you getting into things and making them worse.”

I felt like I was getting welts from all the stings. I’d been the operations manager for over four months, but he still didn’t have any faith me in. I wanted to explain all the precautions I’d taken. Burner devices, unregistered accounts, multiple relays, but remembering Rooker’s hard tone and simple instructions made me wonder if Kāne was right.

“You can’t go in there without someone watching you back, I mean you’re all bad ass and beautiful, but bullets have no since for preservation of the arts,” I tease, but hoped he would reconsider.

“No, not you,” he said flatly.

Below, a delivery truck pulled up, its massive engine rumbled just loud enough to punctuate the empty gulf he’d just put between us.

Kāne was a predator you recognized at a glance. His old gang, the Bucket List Boys, nearly ruled the streets. Thanks to Kāne they’d become the muscle for, The Faction, the Korean Gang that mostly ruled the streets of Boise. But he’d left that all behind for Zita. His brother Seth ran all of that now.

His eyes flashed over to me, then a tired look washed down over his features, and he tried a small smile.

“Let’s just get this gig over with. Then when I have Zita back, we can take some downtime. Maybe then we can visit Mongolia like you keep talking about, now throw me my gun,” He said.

“Sure,” I said and walked over to the table, picked up the gun. “You want black or green?”

“Green, the last thing we need is explosions.” He said, and I loaded an extended magazine for him.

That’s when something hard and metal struck the ground outside outdoor. With a glance, we could both see the shadow of something rolling toward the outside of the door and knew what was about to happen.

“Grenade!” I yelled and slammed a magazine into Kāne’s pistol and tossed it to him. Then I pulled the three-drawer chest down in front of me for cover as I fell.

“The found us,” Kāne hissed, as he snatched the pistol out of the air, and then press himself flat against the wall.

Oddly, nothing exploded.

The only sound I could hear was the sound of a car passing by below us on the street. I pulled my pistol next, then for a second, I thought I’d over-reacted. Guilt was coursing through me.

Had I given us away?

“What was-” I started to say, but suddenly an explosion shattered the night.

The hardest thing in the world to do is to overcome the shock of an explosion. Your ears ring, your vision swims, and vertigo leaves your sense of direction a mess. You recognize everything, but you can’t pull your senses together enough to do anything with that information.

Thankfully, Sertra-Modafinilis was specifically designed to counter everything but the ringing ears and spots in my eyes. Still, everything was thrown into an alternant world of buzzing sounds and blurs of red light behind my eyes.

Movement by the door grabbed my attention and put two rounds into the newcomer’s leg before he could dodge. The rounds just grazed him. He was moving fast, faster than seemed normal, but that had to be the drugs, or maybe the disorientation from the blast.

The man was dressed in typical street samurai attire, a high-necked leather jacket, studded with reactive chain mail, padded rider pants. His overpriced tactical boots were what I saw next, and as I fired two more shots into his chest.

These were no Street Samurai. They weren’t even the Ninjas from before, these were hard core soldiers augmented and hard wired. The Marine Corporation.

“Marines!” I yelled as the window behind me shattered and glass landed in my hair.

The second man in the stack rounded the door frame, only to meet the sledgehammer blows from Kāne’s M17 as it stitched him from chest to right bicep. A scream erupted from his lips. His arm was nearly torn away, but abruptly cut off as Kāne placed two shots between his eyes.

I flashed him a smile and rolled over to load two seeker drones loads into the Governor.

“The goggles!” I hissed and turned my head toward them, then whipped it back as shards of wood peppered my face as a fresh barrage of bullets slammed into the carrying case and drawers it had rested on.

Something popped, like when a campaign bottle lets loose.

“What the fuck was that?” Someone screeched from the other side of the door.

A fine went mist settled on my face, first cool, then burning hot.

“What the hell?” I screamed and stumbled backward. “Was that cyborg spouge?”

“Kāne, just hand over the case, soldier. There’s no way out and you’re outgunned.” The commanding voice called.

Kāne’s M17 fired a multiple round burst just as another Marine in full assault gear rushed in. Again, he seemed unnaturally quick, almost a blur of motion. What were these guys?

As I watched him slam into the wall by the door, another man ducked in and fired two rounds. It was a double tap that drilled into Kāne from short range.

Kāne grunted, but I was fairly certain that the poly alloy mesh under his skin could take those shots. But I was trying to ignore my burning skin and laid into his attacker.

Firing the useless drones at shotgun distance, I slammed the assaulter into the wall, but his own fire forced me to roll away even as my next shot went off. The drones weren’t useless, but they weren’t exactly armor piercing at close range. They needed some distance to activate.

The guy that got Kāne was struggling to his feet, his armor had protected him from the blow, mostly. Mechanically, his eyes slide toward me and a chill ran down my back. There was something inhuman about the glance, something cold and mechanical, and I realized there was no emotion behind those soft brown eyes.

I fired two more shots, striking the assailant in the knee and gut, but the man was already diving toward the floor. For a second, I was confused until I realized he was avoiding a second grenade.

“Oh, shit!” I sighed, as I noticed that this time there was no spoon with it. Instantly I knew they’d cooked off the second one so there wouldn’t be a delay like before.

The blast washed over me and slammed me into the open window, and I felt my back crunch. Then I was cartwheeling out into the street below and landed on a parked pickup truck.

Above me, the jetsam from my apartment spread out over the awnings and café tables that lined 8th street, and I wondered if Kāne was alive. Then, what exactly had been in that case?

All around me, in the smoky red dawn, a shower of sparkles descended like the ash from my cigarette just minutes before. Oddly, it was peaceful. I let my head roll back and looked up into the morning sun, and ignored the burning of my spine. It didn’t take a genius to realize I was screwed.

“Close off the streets, get a hazmat team in here, and secure this combatant!” The voice from upstairs called down, and with a glance I could see him. He was a solider, lean and hard, with salt and pepper hair, a moustache, and hard grey eyes I could see even from the street.

“Is anyone else infected, Coronal Garshack? Is there anything to salvage out of this complete shit show?” Asked a voice that sounded way too amused to be real.

I could see the man who had been called Coronal, was had a thin-looking man in a suit following him as casually as if out for a Sunday stroll.

“I told you we weren’t dealing with amateurs. You should have let me bring in a real team,” Garshack said.

“Apparently, I should have hired those two. They seem to have gotten the better of you, Coronal.”

“They got the better of your puppets!”

“Sir, this one up here is still alive,” Someone reported in a flat, emotionless voice, and once again a cold chill ran over me.

I’d seen a lot of combat and only a psychopath or a robot was that cold once the bullets fly. The soldiers taking up security around me seemed much too much like the former.

“No, he isn’t a soldier. He’s KIA, just like a thief should be.” Coronal Garshack growled.

From somewhere, a gunshot echoed, and despite my pain, I gasped as I realized Kāne was dead.

I wanted to wail, to rage, to tear people apart, but all of that pain and anguish was inside me, my body was a mass of pain and for some reason I couldn’t move.

“What do you want to do with Battlefield Barbie?” The thin Colonel asked.

“Leave her, she can be a reminder to the other freelancers not to fuck with Vision Dynamics.” The suit said. “We’ve done what we came here to do.”