Smoke from the camouflaged man's cigarette curled lazily skyward. Nothing else moved as the two men faced off, pistols drawn.

"I have money," Marcos suggested haltingly in his best broken Burmese. He was pretty sure he'd blown the low tone, but hoped it was still intelligible.

"I know you," came the response in passable English. "You are Bo Marcos, from Blackmountain."

Marcos's eyes widened as he recontextualized the deep set eyes and triangular nose. A faint antiseptic smell of hairspray lingered in the still air. He pictured the young man without his helmet, his shock of black hair perpetually messy despite constant adjustment.

"Maung Ba Kuang! I didn't recognize you in fatigues. What's going on?" Marcos lowered his gun upon identifying his poker buddy, a local brush clearance worker that had until recently been keeping the jungle away from his compound.

"A complicated question. There is a bounty on you Bo Marcos, a bounty on all Blackmountain." Ba Kuang's pistol was still raised.

"You are my friend Muang Ba Kuang. I will not shoot you. Will you shoot me?" Marcos was gambling again. But he had always left poker night with some of Ba Kuang's money.

"I want out Bo Marcos. This country is dangerous. No place for me. No place for my baby. You have money? I need it." Ba Kuang shifted the strap on his shoulder and Marcos realized his 'backpack' was a gun-rat deployment case. Empty. Marcos couldn't really blame him. Desperate times...

"If you want out, you need more than money. You need contacts. I can help you Muang Ba Kuang. But you will need to help me too."

Ba Kaung said nothing, though his pistol dipped a fraction of an inch. Marcos continued, emboldened, "I know an ID broker, an old buddy from special forces. I'll call in a favor to get myself out of this mess. I can cut you in. You and your daughter. But I'll have to stay alive to do it. I need a place to lay low for a day, a place I can make some connections. Then I'll need a ride to the Chinese base up north."

Ba Kuang considered the words, working through the translation. A relieved grin spread across his face. He holstered the glock, passed his cigarette to his left hand, then extended his right. "Bo Marcos, it is a deal." Marcos met the shake with a firm grip and a smile of his own.

"First we must kill the bug." Ba Kuang tapped meaningfully behind his ear, the same spot as the Blackmountain implant in Marcos's head. "This way. Leave the bike, it spies."

Ba Kuang led them a short distance down the trail, then cut off into the underbrush. The going was rough for Marcos with his wounded leg, the uneven ground required a focus and precision of movement that he no longer had. After stumbling for the third time on a twisted root and nearly impaling himself on a clump of bamboo, he called out to Ba Kuang to stop.

Marcos unclipped his medikit and took out another shot of the stimulant/painkiller cocktail Nakagawa had used on him back at Central. He jabbed it into his leg, but the plunger refused to operate. A sensor in the needle had picked up the dose from earlier and was throwing a safety warning. Undeterred, Marcos keyed in an override through his command glasses and dispensed the vial of clear liquid anyway.

He motioned for Ba Kuang to continue, then started walking. The relief was less complete this time, and he noticed a tremor in his hand as he chucked the spent needle into the bushes. The rustle of its passing multiplied in his ears, layering and looping atop itself, gaining volume as it built to a roaring crescendo.

Time slowed down and his vision blurred; Ba Kuang smeared out across the jungle, a thousand concerned expressions looking in from all directions. Marcos felt his heart slamming erratically in his chest, a wounded bird dashing itself against the cage. His jaw clenched and unclenched violently and a thin stream of spittle bubbled out the corner of his mouth.

He doubled over and took one deep breath, then another, willing his autonomic nervous system to get its shit together. A palm tree tessellated in an arc across his vision, a leafy green tunnel with a glowing red dot in the center. The light grew ever bigger and brighter, pulsing and vibrating as it consumed all it touched. The awful crimson luminance seared his retinas; the sky strained to hold it.

Marcos felt something tugging at his waist, as if from a great distance. Then there was a pinch in his thigh, and the angry orb began to shrink. Slowly the tremors subsided, the roar in his ears abated, and the multiple images settled back into the singular world he was used to. His command glasses alternately flashed a red warning message and a jagged cardiogram that was just starting to settle down. His heart rate was 120 beats per minute and falling. Not exactly great, but the acute danger had passed. He looked up and realized he was lying on his back with Ba Kuang crouching over him, an empty lorazepam syringe in hand.

"Luumite." Ba Kuang spat into the bushes. "No more overdosing. I need you to live."

Marcos stood, took a few cautious steps, vaguely surprised at having feet. His brain was pudding, but at least his leg felt a little better. Vitals still seemed stable. Ba Kuang watched him intently for further signs of distress. Then he shrugged and resumed walking, checking over his shoulder every few steps to make sure Marcos hadn't collapsed again.

Another hour of walking brought them to a cluster of five small buildings hastily fabricated from bamboo and corrugated metal. A generator whirred away noisily at the edge of the clearing, a series of cables snaking out from it to each shack. The smell of fish broth wafted out from the nearest. Marcos salivated, remembering his abandoned lunch of tea leaf salad from what felt like a lifetime ago.

A lone lookout sat on a steel chair covered in flaking paint, regarding Marcos with some skepticism. A bowl of steaming mystery stew had been hastily deposited at his feet. He had one-hand on his rifle, but didn't raise it. Ba Kuang smiled at him and flashed the "OK" sign. The guard seemed satisfied and returned to his dinner.

Ba Kuang led Marcos up to a shack with a greater preponderance of electrical cords running to it. The rust-flecked roof was shot through with various dishes and antennae, as if some steel fungus had fruited from the decaying metal. "My friend here can help with your bug problem. I will talk to her." Ba Kuang indicated for Marcos to wait outside as he went in the door. A brief conversation in Burmese ensued, then Ba Kuang re-emerged.

"She says it is sixty million kyat for the operation, plus she will keep the hardware." He relayed this almost apologetically; from his tone Ba Kuang regarded the sum as somewhere between unfathomable and infinite.

"Fine," said Marcos waving his money away, "I don't see that I have much choice."

Ba Kuang raised one eyebrow, then nodded and led him through the door. A blast of cool air greeted them as they crossed the threshold. The room inside was not what Marcos expected. Five constellations of concentric light rings hung at regularly spaced intervals down the length of the structure - they reminded Marcos of the surgical lights in an operating theater. Only the center-most was lit, providing a halo of blue-white illumination over a horseshoe-shaped table. The table top was covered with a smattering of advanced-looking electronics in various states of disassembly. Every surface in the room was coated in a pristine white epoxy; the walls, the floor, the table, even the ceiling.

Seated in the middle of the horseshoe was a slender Burmese woman wearing a surgical mask and form-fitting scrubs, both white of course. Settled over her shoulder-length hair was a leather strap connected to her peculiar eye-ware. An array of lenses fanned out like flower petals around each eye, a glittering blur of constant motion. As Marcos watched they whirred in an out of the goggle housing, cycling through different magnifications faster than he could track.

The woman's arms hovered above the table, a pair of black mesh waldo gloves providing the only contrast in the room. Her hands moved with a confident grace as she tele-operated on a minuscule circuit board. Some combination of fatigue, drugs, and dramatic lighting left Marcos fully mesmerized by the performance. His mouth hung partway open and it took him a moment to realize he was holding his breath.

Ba Kaung elbowed him gently and gestured down to the floor they stood on. Marcos removed his boots and put them in one of the (white) bins stacked by the door for this purpose. It closed by itself with a faint pneumatic hiss. Ba Keung handed Marcos a gown to pull over his fatigues, then did the same for himself.

Marcos passed a few more minutes in enraptured contemplation until finally the dancing lenses were still. The operator flipped up her goggles, revealing a pair of piercing cork-brown eyes framed by thick lashes.

"I understand you have need of my services. You have already agreed to my fee or you would not be here. Please transfer it now." A payment request popped up on Marcos's glasses. He double-checked the amount then accepted. The woman waited a few moments for the confirmation, then gave the barest nod.

"Very good. You will call me Weizza. The process we are to attempt is both complicated and risky. A lesser practitioner might expect a ten percent survival rate. In my hands you have at least twenty." As Weizza was saying this she reached one of her strangely gloved hands up toward Marcos's ear.

He started to voice an objection when her index finger stroked the top of his command module. There was an audible pop, then a sudden spark of raw pleasure surged through his body, obliterating all hope of speech or thought. The opiate rush ebbed and gave way to a contented sense of well-being. God he was tired.

Weizza stared intently into his eyes, hand lightly cupping his ear. An unexpected lightness overcame him; he felt himself falling in to the black pools of her pupils. "Sleep," she said. And he did.