The dangerous reality is made evident to the entirety of Marauder Team.

A universe inherently hostile, every aspect of its creation seemingly created to provoke the suffering of life. From the adversarial basis of evolution, destruction in the creation of new elements, to even the all-consuming nature of progress is evidence. There is no purpose for living except the killing of things, no reason for love, joy, and happiness in a cold uncaring sea of stars.

The breakfast buffet is exactly as before, a continental spread made by machines as perfectly replicated as possible: the same taste, the same texture, the same organization, the same temperature.

Lieutenant Keys makes the casual comment as he skips over to the chosen table of his squad mates. “If it's the same food by Friday then we start going to restaurants. If I have to eat this crap for twenty six days I will literally kill Ling.”

The Master Sergeant is half buried in scrambled eggs, his reply marked with an immediate readiness for combat. “什麼?”

“I’m joking dude.”

A quick turn from serious to a chuckle, the Marine relaxing his stance easily. “Ok ok.”

They all are present early this morning, a near-supernaturalness to their adaptability providing less tired gazes than before. Bodies already awake, passable food already digested, merely waiting for the arrival of their guide for another workday.

T.A.C. speaks through their collective earpieces, every single member of Marauder Team hearing his synthesized voice. “Comm-check, comm-check please.”

Lieutenant Keys holds his breath. “And now we got the surveillance drone in our ears…”

“Marauder Two confirmed com-check.” The machine counts.

“Checking communication.” Master Sergeant Ling confirms as he slams the rest of his mug of warm water.

“Marauder Lead confirmed.”

“Check.” Corporal Mercier coldly answers.

“Marauder Three checked.”

“C.W.O. Chernyshevsky cheking in.” Cherny finalizes.

“Confirmed Marauder Four. All communication checks completed.”

Lieutenant Keys looks towards his squad, fiddling with the singular wireless bud in his right ear. “You know I brought two pairs of these for myself...”

“We need a way to keep in touch.” Ling informs as he presses the one in his left ear.

Keys grumbles to himself like a sarcastic toddler. “I mean yeah but… they’re mine…”

The Combat Drone adds on top of his squad leader with a blast of sarcasm. “There are better ways than using a commercial messaging application for military communications, but we must make do with what we have I suppose.”

Their phones ring as the message is received, their handler sending out the message like clockwork.

Agt. Morsow: Good morning @TF-31, I’ve attached today's schedule for you all! See you all in fifteen!

“What is the deal for today?” Mercier asks.

Keys processes the words on the schedule. “Looks like a residential block tour, a light lunch at a french cafe…” He stops to give the finger guns towards the Frenchwoman, the Corporal narrowing her eyes at the callout,“... and then three hours at the Lunar Elevator Terminal.”

“Easy day.” Master Sergeant Ling nods.

Keys voices their universal understanding of the issue. “Probably to keep us out of trouble. Seriously, I don’t want to imagine Admiral Tucker’s reaction if we end up on the news again.”

“He will kill us all.”

“That he will.” The Lieutenant finishes. “And I don’t intend on being in front of the firing squad this time around.”

Only Cherny seems concerned with the implication, a poor grasp of foreign language taking the idiom as a literal threat. “Wait, is it…”

“Not literally killing us. Means he’s gonna really yell at us. And he’s only yelled at us once…”

“Twice.” Master Sergeant Ling corrects.

“...twice while on the Beijing. And I think we’d like to keep at that number.”

A small service robot scurries over to their table, the flat topped six wheeled drone an associate waiter of the establishment; a force multiplier for an actual human staff now pretty much left to just two in the face of economic disaster.

Dirty cups and plates carefully placed upon the rubberized surface, a moment of pause as the displaying menu, holographically casted to face the customers, takes a few seconds to rerender.

There’s other items available for an extra cost, with only a temptation and a physical press of a button separating consumer and product. Beyond just breakfast items too, from slices of flash frozen and defrosted cheesecake, colorful plates of artificially colored sushi, and even a supposedly “real” new york steak.

“I really wanna try an a la carte smoothie…” Lieutenant Keys begins to drool as he scrolls through the obviously staged photos of menu offerings. “Maybe a pineapple fruit blast…”

Cherny stops him in his tracks with a life threatening fact. “We on lunar surface, no tree for ананас here.”

“Dude you think they have coffee trees here too?” Keys counters casually towards the Medic’s current beverage of choice. “If it can’t be grown in an orbital farm or a hydroponic bay it’s made outta things that are grown in an orbital farm or a hydroponic bay. I’m American Cherny, if there’s a problem I just don’t think about it and then it's not a problem. Works every time.”

It's a vast implication for life in the orbital lanes of Earth; water and air almost fully recyclable through both chemical and natural processes, but not nutrition. A human taboo of directly eating reprocessed sewage needing a more creative approach to coax forth edible matter, now found in the dots of hydroponics structures within the orbital spheres.

Genetically modified food crops grown with immense efficiency, microgravity “food engineers” working alongside robotic farmhands producing raw tonnages to rival civilizations at the dawn of agriculture. Bushels of soybeans, clusters of peas, bulbs of garlic, and huge sheets of pulverized algae produced in nightless cycles beneath both unshielded solar power and artificial lighting.

Subsequently chemically processed into specific strands of amino acids, concentrated doses of vitamins, servings of critical minerals, and least importantly: notes of taste. Massive packages of raw materials shipped across the orbital lanes at a lethargic pace, to be reprocessed and reconstituted on-location for the nutritional needs of crew and company.

To questionable results.

Lieutenant Jonathan Keys, Service ID O-68-0211, is a wounded in action casualty.

A dying body convulsing on the ground, mostly ignored by his comrades in a desperate triage of his ego.

“Uhhahahahahahhhhhhahguh.” The Combat Engineer pretends to groan.

“Do not die.” Master Sergeant Ling orders, finishing up his plate of hashbrowns as he stands atop the crime scene.

Cherny takes a sick pride in his lecture towards his squadmate. “I said not to drink. Bad for deigestive system.”

“That wasn’t even fucking pineapple…” Keys oozes out, reaching up towards the neon-yellow glass of chemical toxins on the table. “Uuhuhuhahnausla.”

Agent Morosow stops at the dining hall’s doorway, the entire sight completely inoperable without proper context. A member of his charge is already dead, the remaining gang of uncontrollable paramilitary soldiers completely ignoring their comrade.

“The Agent is here.” Mercier callously reports as sharp eyes spot the intruding member.

All of them turn in an instant, including the Lieutenant currently on the ground.

Utter, awkward silence at their position.

‘I-is everything alright?!” The Agent immediately asks as he skips over.

Lieutenant Keys only needs one motion to get himself back up, the lower gravitational constant only needing a single push off the ground to put the body onto its feet. A character turning from dying wounded to a fully functional System Defense Force Marine in an instant, the response is put forth with callous sarcasm. “We’re fine.”

“Are you.” Cherny narrows his eyes at the now suddenly healthy specimen.

The liquid almost has a radioactive glow to it from the lighting scheme above, a trick of the eye presenting an even less appetizing form of beverage now on a second glance.

“You know what, I'll make it a goal!” The Lieutenant spontaneously promises. “I’ll try and find ONE serving of pineapple on this lifeless rock that won’t try and kill me.”

Ling subtly notes the contradiction from within his friend’s statement. “You do not like pineapple…”

“Well I don’t hate it. But it seems like something you should be getting right right?! Like how can you make… somewhat passable… orange juice in zero G but not fucking pineapple?! It’s ridiculous, insane! I’m questioning my faith in modern food science!”

It's not purposefully oppressive, but the nature of bureaucratic developed housing on a shoestring materials budget still brings a concerning degree of tyrannical implications. Dormitories reminiscent of an American based college education, windowed individual rooms strung together with fabricated lunar concrete walls.

Different mixtures taken from different lunar sources; each composition of rough lunar regolith pulverized, processed, mixed with chemically created water, printed into their final shapes, dried and finally polished; the sheer number of factors creating nearly every combination of dull coloration. A soft, off-gray color shifting on a long, light-to-dark gradient from the first floor up to the visible eight; the remainder to the structure built into walls of the semi-underground city.

Dirt, created from the organic decay of spent food-matter and held together by compostable polymers, grows forth real fescue grass lawns. Not large by any means when compared to their more common soccer field equivalents, but big enough to turn eyes from newcomers.

It's a marvel of human engineering, a casual habitation of the lunar body given no second thought by the current, mostly absent inhabitants. Instead, an opinion left to the six interlopers of the small community.

“It is nice.” Master Sergeant Ling nods in approval.

“Nice?” Mercier narrows her eyes at the statement, checking a messaging app on her phone in the midst of her reply. “It very… dystopique? With security cameras.”

It's only through her perfect vision can she comprehend the scale of it, the small nodules of protective black glass scattered across ceilings. Every corner monitored, every hallway insured.

“Don’t worry, no human has access to any of these video cameras. It’s all AI monitored.” Agent Morsow uneasily assures to the squad, waving his hands in a general, black box explanation. “Much faster and not that many ethical concerns involved.”

Keys crosses his arms with his grumbled answer. “It’s most importantly barely legal. Gotta love the surveillance state, am I right guys?”

Both Ling and Cherny just stare blankly, their own national histories stuffed with the normalization of the iconic society, while Mercier nods in full agreement. French freedom, a recent youth highly focused on the controversial topic. “Very bad for privacy.”

“It’s a necessary… feature.” Morsow attempts to defend calmly. “It's more effective to catalog the movements of civilians for a daily dataset refreshed on a standard eighteen dimension classification model; I believe it's a decision tree model. So any suspicious activity will be immediately detected if anything is removed from the standard median calculation. It’s all quite simple, actually.”

An obfuscation by intentional complexity, suddenly simplified by the raw chemistry of sarcasm. Lieutenant Keys’ answer to the issue is a near-direct quote from the Liberty Party of America. “By the way; if criminals did crimes in front of security cameras then there’d be no criminals. Obviously since we still have a crime rate it means either the security cameras are malfunctioning, or the criminals don’t do crimes in front of them.”

The Master Sergeant narrows his eyes at his friend’s statement. “Huh?”

“You can’t cover every square meter of Camp Armstrong with those things, cause you can’t film people taking showers or doing the deed. So of course the Space Liberation Front’s gonna still exist, right. RIGHT? COME ON. At least tell me you guys are doing the smart thing and prioritizing coverage, or did my momma’s tax dollars go straight into just spamming these things everywhere?!”

Cherny leans into Corporal Mercier’s ear, a psychological evaluation completed in mere seconds. “He is not ok.”

“Is he ever?” Mercier narrows.

Agent Morsow nods with a calm answer. “All security systems prioritize coverage, that’s how it’s always been here.”

In ear pieces, T.A.C. gives the actual fact as he monitors the conversation. “The original sections of Camp Armstrong made during the initial construction phases did not, and currently do not include surveillance systems.”

“Yeah that’s what I thought.” Keys says aloud, a translation literal to both the digital listener and the human agent in front of him. “Sorry.”

A general activity level left relatively light in the middle of the workday, the only inhabitants either sick-leave salaried employees quarantined within domiciles or off-hours staff taking a morning walk. The low drone of traffic still permeates through the thick alloy bulkheads separating out the city, a constant noise pollution from the heavy fabrication centers echoing through the semi-buried lunar colony.

The meshing between government subsidized housing and corporate villages is barely noticeable, both sides working towards a primary objective of low cost and maximum usage of space. Concrete blocks equipped with modular commercial zones; automated cantinas for socialization, high capacity self-service restaurants for food, and convenience stores for convenience.

Communities built into one another in the reflection of a modern world in a modern time almost four hundred thousand kilometers away. Its very creation in a place utterly hostile to human life a representation of lethal defiance, one that holds together ambitions beyond just two worlds.

Corporal Estelle Mercier plays too many video games.

An above median post-tax income mostly spent on an ever increasing digital library of games spread across three storefronts, each one possibly played before being subsequently discarded into the eternal trove of dust collectors. Every genre from every budget level, content from every corner of the world purchased either on a mid-discount whim or based off of deceptive cinematic trailers shown in industry trade shows.

Epic fantasy MMOs capture short attention spans before the grind bores her away, slow paced stealth games too tedious, and fast-paced first person shooters discarded after community death. Indie games played, if luckily just once, while huge budgeted projects with the price tag to boot are given at least some time of day, if not just to justify the purchase itself.

But it does give her some breadth of experience, all requiring at least something in the situational awareness department training her already incredible eyes into a state of constant, unwanted attention to her surroundings.

She notices it first, before anyone else does.

A consistently similar skin tone, the same uniform down to its creases, and the ever so subtle gaunt in the lunar gallop all turn towards a trailing observer.

Late 20s, possibly early 30s male; the crimson red highlights on a uniform indicative of corporate origin within the Lunar Developments Corporation.

Corporal Mercier grabs the Master Sergeant’s shoulder, subtly enough not to draw any extra attention to the notion. “We are being followed, do not look.”

A casual laughter from one of Lieutenant Keys’ jokes immediately stopped, Marauder Leader leaning towards his subordinate with an acknowledging nod. “Ok.”

No tac-net system currently in play, but hand signals universal enough from software that it gives attention to an incoming threat. A finger gun made from a finger and a thumb in the shape of an L from the non-dominant hand signifying caution, pointed at his heart.

It takes a few seconds for them all to notice the sign, the lack of any tactical networking forcing them back to crude eyeballs for the telling of information.

A long glance taken between one another before his next strung order, absolutely silent reaction finishes the conversation.

A clenched fist pounded twice towards his wrist; an order to check timing.

Between them they uncover the universal order: danger, but delayed danger. Possible hostile contacts in position, but not yet detected by tactical networking systems. Caution taken, the entirety of Marauder Team forcing themselves to a heightened state of alertness poorly hidden beneath a facade of casualness. Heads on swivels, eyes scanning the off-road as they leap through the space in lunar gravity.

“Is everything alright?” The FBI Agent asks casually as he notices the significant jump in social pressure.

All at once they look at him, Master Sergeant Ling nodding quickly as he answers for his squad with cold seriousness. “Yes. Nothing is wrong.”

Eyes narrowed, a behavior index odd but still remaining in somewhat normal parameters for his charge. He has no choice but to believe him. “Alright?”

It’s not a good state of affairs.

A collection of three lookouts gathered from each member of Marauder Team’s passive observations, a consistent following through nearly five blocks of distance and four detour insistences from the members of the System Defense Force squad.

All angles covered on them, a metaphorical gun to their heads as the hour of reckoning arrives.

It is situated right in the public space, in a main arterial road currently filling with foot traffic for the mid-day shift change. A small, quaint cafe named simply the La Tasse Vide in seemingly hand painted wood atop its commercial front, a purely outdoor seating arrangement convenient in a perfectly climate controlled atmosphere but also a sniper’s dream in a combat zone.

Metal chairs surrounding metal mesh tables provide little to no weight in the situation, covered by useless hemp umbrellas. A literal killzone from seventy five percent of three dimensional space, with just one source of soft cover provided in a flower planter box.

They take a seat at the corner, farthest away from the street covered by a tan decorative umbrella.

All of Marauder remains at combat alert.

Marauder Four and Marauder Lead remain standing, while both Marauder Two and Three half-sit in chairs; ready for explosive motion either into cover or towards approaching attackers.

Agent Morsow expresses his concern again, narrowing his eyes at the state of his charge. “Is… everything alright?”

“Not really.” Marauder Two mindlessly answers with a tense pull on his lips, still remaining on sentry duty. A combat engineering skill gathering points of possible cover, of vectors of attack against them.

“What do you mean?” Morsow continues to ask.

“Possibly being attacked.” Marauder Lead informs quickly. “We have been followed for the past hour.”

The Agent turns quickly, immediately scanning the surroundings for any incoming threat. Eyes surgically fixed in childhood for better vision, yet unable to discern any weapons or possible surveillance equipment with a surface level glance. “What are you talking about?”

“You think the Space Liberation Front’s gonna let what happened yesterday slide?” Keys offhandedly informs. “Not this time. Especially if it's a juicy target like us.”

Morsow betrays the neglect, a society already softening against a promise of utopia. “All due respect, but you’re all being paranoid.”

A real human waiter delivers the food from the bar-like serving window; a spread of dishes at the table specifically ordered for maximum combat potential. A light lunch turning into a heavy, dinner styled meal; family servings made of solid slabs of lab grown meat, fork-requiring spaghetti, and absurdly hot coffee in reusable, low gravity proofed thermoses. All served atop luxurious, supposedly shatter proof ceramic plates and bowls.

“Parinoid?” Cherny grumbles coldly, a question more geared to the rhetorical rather than an actual request. “Is actual war location here.”

“This isn’t a warzone.” Morsow continues with an audible annoyance, his own tofu salad arriving along with the insane spread. “Relax and eat.”

There’s a rush, crowds created primarily of workers going off and on shift in the midday change. Movement through the main arterial road of Camp Armstrong completely enveloping operational procedure, too many faces and too many individuals to sift through with only the perceptions of simple eyeballs.

Corporal Mercier pulls from her experience, her training from her initial postings within counter terrorist teams in deep jungle towns now used once again in a hostile environment. “If there is an attack, it will be now.”

Keys pushes his earpiece. “T.A.C. call the cops.”

It’s static in response, a broken reply through an activated jamming signal. T.A.C’s voice acknowledges the seriousness within their ear pieces. “Emerge-y ser-c-es… con-cat…”

The Master Sergeant looks over his shoulder as well, checking his mobile phone alongside the rest. “I have no wi-fi. We are fucked, be ready.”

One company once ruled the orbital lanes.

A conglomeration born from the chaos of uneasy times, superseding even their original nation states in the pursuit of profit and unchecked power. Guns and combat space suits, massive solar farms and asteroid mining vehicles, from the simplest screws to sprawling logistics software, vacation centers to elder care facilities; every single aspect of orbital life under just one power, one point of failure.

Nobody talks about the fall, at least, not yet. Information sealed within the deepest intelligence vaults in isolated server stacks or burned to ash, inconvenient truths far too dangerous to risk exposure to the world.

Yet a legacy that still holds too much importance in the political games of the modern world.

He’s betrayed by the simplicity of mass media; a situation repeated far too many times on online videos and games. Death seen through the goggles of VR headsets, simulated reality simply simulated.

Vision tunneling on a terminal approach, hand gripping the now warm steel of a hammered together grip of his submachine gun. All sound falling away, the body crash dumping adrenaline for the simple instincts of fight and flight. A single objective takes over, failing, faltering; eyes calculating with perfect perception. Now only five meters away from them; four, three, two…

A draw so slow, the clumsy weapon ripped from his pants pocket towards the smudges of dark blue uniforms. Time slowing, thoughts fading away as crude sights align with theoretical targets.

“DIE FASCIST FU…”

Before the thirty four kilogram wrought iron chair crushes his skull.