Adi smiled an actual, unguarded smile when she saw what Nyomi had packed. Three bags of chin-chin sat neatly on top, each batch cut into little golden pillows, fried just the way she liked them; crisp, not greasy, with the scent of fresh nutmeg hitting her the moment the bag crinkled. Nyomi always went heavy on the nutmeg. Adi appreciated that kind of devotion.
Beneath the chin-chin waited her other guilty pleasure: crunchy, salty, and just-spicy-enough kuli-kuli sticks, paired with a sealed pot of cold, savory garri soakings. The faint scent of vat-grown soy-synth peanuts and fermented cassava tickled her enhanced nose before she even opened it.
Then came the bag of soy-synth fish jerky, vat-grown protein trying its damnedest to impersonate actual fish and failing miserably. The jerky’s Dragon’s Breath pepper marinade douses it so thoroughly that taste buds are irrelevant, anyway. Adi grinned wider; at slightly more than five million Scoville Heat Units, only someone stupidly hungry or fully augmented would even attempt it. She was proudly both.
Finally, resting at the bottom, was the vacuum-sealed poly container of nian gao cake. Adi’s eyes narrowed in satisfaction; the thing was practically bursting with chewy pieces of dried Chinese dates. A quarter of the cake remains. Nyomi had been rationing the good stuff. Sensible, but to Adi's stomach, cruel.
A faint flicker of memory stirred as Adi ran her thumb across the sealed container. The other night, during one of the uncommon evenings when she and Nyomi were both home, they walked hand-in-hand through a bustling night market.
The city pulsed around them with its usual dissonant blend of cheap neon, blaring advertisements, the ozone sting of repulsor exhaust, and the constant thrum of plasma power conduits bleeding energy into the skyline. Someone's screen blares Mars Mystery AI Science Theater. Adi wonders how many years old the episode is.
Nyomi’s small hand, warm and firm in Adi’s augmented grip, moved with them past the typical vendors selling synthetic materials of varying quality, unauthorized biological enhancements, dubious weaponry and components, and piles of brightly lit, steaming street food.
Rickshaws, taxis, and shuttles, both official and illicit, wove through the streets, picking up and dropping off passengers. Adi noted several cabbie and shuttle drivers engaged in heated arguments, probably over passengers and territory.
The air in the market thrummed, thick with the acrid bite of roasting meat, the sweet perfume of spices, and the hazy veil of smoke that stung the eyes. A symphony of sizzles and pops from the grills, the clatter of pans, and the boisterous calls of vendors filled the ears, all mingling with the warm, dry feeling of the bustling crowd.
But then they passed one vendor’s table loaded with dried Chinese dates. The plump crimson fruit was doing surprisingly well on Chendiuria these days; some botany corp had finally cracked the code on vat-growing them en masse without losing too much of their Old Earth flavor.
Adi remembered barely registering the table, more focused on the warmth of Nyomi’s hand, the rare peace of the evening, and the thrill of pretending for just one damn night that life was something resembling normal.
But Nyomi, sly as always, must have slipped back to that vendor after Adi’s attention drifted elsewhere. And here was the evidence—a cache of dates, their sticky sweetness clinging to fingertips, folded into the nian gao cake.
The cake itself, a dense, slightly chewy square, offered a faint, sugary aroma, a quiet little ambush of sweetness tucked into her food pack, waiting to be discovered. Adi shook her head slightly, a wry smirk curling her lips. Sneaky little thing. You always knew how to play me, love.
Her augmented sense of smell caught the faintest trace of Nyomi’s favorite jasmine-oil perfume lingering on the poly-bag. Nyomi drew small, hopping green frogs with hearts in their eyes on the bag. Another small gift tucked inside the chaos.
Adi swapped her lightweight tac vest for the heavy Colonial Marine assault vest, the familiar weight settling across her shoulders like an old, violent friend. The reinforced armor plating locked into place with a muted series of clicks, polymer and advanced alloys hugging her frame over the matte-black flex-weave of her motorcycle suit. A brief ping from her neural net indicated a green threat assessment on the HUD and that all systems were nominal.
Her Shadowfury rifle rode comfortably in her arms in the cradle carry position, safety off, one armor-piercing high-explosive round chambered and waiting. That round could punch through most civilian-grade subdermal armor like a vibra-needle through silk. Adi tossed the messenger bag's strap across her left shoulder, keeping it well clear of the rifle's retention strap secured tight across her right. Smooth. No snags and no hang-ups.
The streets were nearly empty. A few scavengers, some cargo runners, a few hunched figures moving with that cautious, don't-look-at-me gait that screamed low-tier criminal or desperate gig worker. The dim city lights reflected off the ever-present haze of industrial particulates hanging like a greasy ghost between the crumbling towers.
A few street-level surveillance drones blinked half-heartedly as she passed, their optics struggling to parse her heavily augmented heat signature through the interference. Niles had picked his bar's location well; the Gut didn’t exactly scream high-priority patrol zone to the Blues or the city's AI.
Adi kept moving, boots silent on the cracked ferrocrete, eyes forward, every motion calculated. Out here, people knew better than to stare too long at someone like her. Muscles coiled under synthetic fibers, rifle loose but ready, amber eyes glowing faintly beneath the brim of her hood. The rare few who noticed her quickly found something else very interesting to look at.
Stepping quickly but with the silent, deliberate precision born of muscle memory and paranoia, Adi ducked into a narrow doorway half-swallowed by grime and shadows. The crumbling synthcrete alcove reeked of despair on a heatwave: layers of rotting trash, the chemical stench of burned drugs, stale piss, and the tangy undertone of fresh shit. She wrinkled her nose, muttering a curse through clenched teeth.
The foul smell of rat remained on her clothes, as tenacious as a clingy ex. She hoped the cocktail of alley funk would mask her enough to scramble any cheap olfactory drone or bio-sniffer. Not that she expected one, as canines were damn near nonexistent on Chendiuria; their upkeep too high and their biology too inconvenient for the gene-mod economy. Still, better to smell like fermented regret and trash than be easy to trace.
Her neural net pinged softly in the background. TA still live. TarAcq marking threat vectors. ARD throwing minimal overlays across her field of vision. MSI humming under her skin like a loaded spring. Modern, info tech systems were supposed to have cured themselves of this kind of chaos long, long ago.
Too many augmented warriors got smoked because they let their systems idle during “quiet” moments. Adi was not about to be that dumb. She just had to suffer through. She heard the rumors about heavily augmented warriors such as herself receiving personal AI assistants. Like the Corps would ever hand over the credits for a personal assistant AI for the average Marine. SpecOps—maybe.
She crouched slightly and scanned her back-trail. Her eyes flicked through spectrums: visible, IR, UV (through her weapon's optics), EM, even ghosting into deep sound-mapping. Nothing stood out. No pursuit, no dumbass gangers trying to follow the tall girl with the scary stare and the habit of breaking fingers before asking questions.
Still, she waited. Silent. Breathing through her mouth. This wasn't paranoia. It was experience, and she'd survived too much to trust luck with her six.
Adi, half-hidden in the doorway's gloom, unwrapped a fake chocolate Shitty-C, one of the universally loathed Sean Cawley meal supplement ration bars. The foil wrapper crinkled softly in her gloved hand as she eyed the label with suspicion, as if it might suddenly apologize for its taste.
Of all the flavor abominations Kane provided, the fake chocolate was technically the least offensive. That was not saying much. Fake vanilla was an insult to human dignity. The fruit and berry versions? War crimes in vacuum-sealed foil.
She bit down. The bar fought back. Even with her bionic myofascial reinforcements—carbon weave, micro-bio-hydraulic assist, and bioelectric micro-servos built strong enough for snapping bones and crushing steel—her jaw still protested. Chewing a Shitty-C bar was like trying to masticate reinforced safety foam dipped in cheap synthetic protein sludge.
Adi grimaced, her neural net momentarily flickering an alert that her temporomandibular joint torque was peaking higher than baseline. She manually suppressed the warning with a mental flick, muttering under her breath, “Bite through it, or starve. Thanks, Kane, you cheap bastard.”
The flavor, a harsh imitation of chocolate with a strange metallic tang and an unsettling sweetness, assaulted her taste buds. Somewhere, some asshole in a corporate food lab had signed off on this as "palatable, fit for human consumption." She kept chewing because calories were calories and her system burned through them like a fucking runaway reactor core.
Adi rechecked her back trail, her eyes flicking through vision modes with the casual precision of a veteran. Her night vision provides clarity as if it were daytime. Infrared sliced through some of the heat signatures bleeding off cheap power cores and struggling HVAC units. Telescopic vision snapped distant shadows into tight, crisp focus.
Her natural low-light vision, even without the other augments, was already damned near predatory, thanks to the fine layer of mirrored crystalline structures embedded in her irises. A little permanent gift from the Corps’ wetware labs. With adaptive optics, micro-scale contrast amplifiers, and quantum-fed image processing augmenting it, her eyesight was almost impossibly good.
Nothing moved behind her. No stray heat blooms, no unusual motion trails, no micro-drones pretending to be urban debris. Clean for now. Still, she knew better. Chendiuria had a way of hiding teeth in its shadows.
She flipped briefly to short-range thermal more out of habit than hope. As usual, it was not much help. Though it was night, the streets still baked under the planet’s relentless 50°C daytime average. Every wall and slab of prefab concrete radiating heat like pissed-off furnace plates.
Thermal was mostly a wash, just a sea of glowing reds and oranges. Anything smaller than a running generator or runaway power core would blend right into the background noise. To be picked up by her thermal sight, a stalker would have to be engulfed in flames.
For the umpteenth time, Adi cursed the Corps under her breath for shutting off her UV vision post-discharge. Medical necessity, they had called it. Too much sensory overload, they had said, worried about her pushing past safe neural thresholds.
Screw that. The UV layer had been damn useful for spotting certain synthetic fibers, blood traces, and cloaking distortions. But no, her net's safety governors were locked tighter than a Finance Bureau audit.
Information overload was the real enemy now. She fought the urge to fixate on any one channel, letting her MSI suite blend the inputs, weighting threats, filtering noise. The trick was not seeing more; it was knowing how much to see before you drowned in your own data.
Adi extracted a water bulb from her webbing and took a long drink while partially consuming yet another chocolate-flavored Shitty-C bar, relieved it was not fruit-flavored. The warm liquid tasted faintly of recycled synthetic polymers, but it got the job done. Her net pinged a fractional alert, barely a blip, but enough.
Against the messy AR overlay, she caught sight of a stealthy micro-drone moving in a slow, almost defiant circle out of the corner of her vision. Its profile was thin; it was a newer model, compact, high-speed vector thrusters, adaptive camo struggling to compensate for a thin shimmer in the heated air currents. It was good, but not good enough.
Before the thought had even fully processed, her combat suite dropped into micro-time. Adi's muscles tensed under her bionic overlays, subdermal armor flexing automatically to stabilize. Her left arm smoothly and swiftly secured the pulse rifle as her right thumb disengaged the safety. A half-second targeting solution blinked in her HUD with TarAcq locked. The drone juked to evade, but it was already too late.
PFT-PFT-PFT.
Three whisper-cracks of hyper-accelerated 15-mm rounds stitched the air. The drone shattered into jagged polycarbonate and alloy shrapnel, raining down on the pitted street like multi-colored metallic confetti.
The echo of the shots slapped off the surrounding buildings, but Adi barely registered it, her enhanced hearing dampening the report before it reached nerve-shredding levels. Marine augments, lion-grade ear protection included, were one of the few things the Corps had gotten exactly right.
Lowering the rifle, she eyed the ruined micro-drone pieces skittering across the pavement, some still sparking. "Tough little bastard," she muttered.
Her mind raced through probabilities. The Blues? Unlikely they didn’t use this kind of stealth scout in the Gut. Local corpsec? Not impossible, but no obvious reason. Kane? Very possible. The fucker was always watching, playing chess with his own people.
Adi took another bite of the Shitty-C bar and chewed slowly, eyes narrowing.
Kane, if that was yours… you better hope you were not planning to reuse it.
