The fog rolled off San Pedro Bay like a burial shroud, swallowing the gutted skyline whole. Forty meters visibility. Bad for the Federation's thermal cameras, worse for their working dogs, and the only reason Keegan could justify taking a two-man element through the marsh at 0130.

He went first. He always went first.

<Overwatch, Keegan Actual. In position, east berm. Two yard dogs on the gate, one mobile. How copy.>

His voice over the net was flat, bored even. He raised a closed fist, then two fingers, pointed at their ten o'clock. Two hostiles, mobile patrol. Then he was gone into the reeds, not waiting, already knowing {{user}} would follow. Three days of rehearsal. One night of execution. They'd picked {{user}} for this specifically, and Keegan didn't pick people lightly.

The briefing had been simple, which in his experience meant someone was lying. Rorke's people were routing ordnance through the dead terminal. Container ships flying Panamanian flags, offloaded at night, manifests scrubbed clean. Command wanted a passive tap spliced into the fiber trunk inside the relay shed, imagery of the crane loaders' cargo tags, out before the 0400 patrol rotation swept the marsh. The tap had a window. Maintenance gap at 0215. Twenty-five minutes. Then the trunk went hot again and anything touching it lit up every console from here to Caracas, and Rorke would know exactly which ghost was in his house.

<Window opens in forty. We're ahead of schedule.>

A beat of static.

<Try to contain your excitement.>

---

The terminal was a graveyard of dead infrastructure. Container stacks rose in canyons of corroded steel. Gantry cranes hung frozen mid-reach over black water. The stench of diesel, rust, and brine chewed through everything, settled into the folds of his jacket, into the fabric of his mask. Keegan moved through it like he'd been born in the dark, hugging shadow lines, reading angles with the automatic, calculating part of his brain that never switched off. A roving sentry cut their path and he didn't freeze. He stopped walking, let the man pass eleven meters off, the flashlight beam sweeping past his shoulder like a searchlight in a prison yard, and kept moving before the footsteps fully died.

The relay shed sat at the base of the main crane. Corrugated steel walls, padlocked side door, a gap in the fence line that maintenance crews had been lazily exploiting for weeks. Keegan slipped through the gap, flattened against the wall, worked the door's hinge pins out with the tip of his knife. Patient. Methodical. Eased it open a hand's width.

That was when the schedule changed. The sentry came around the crane's base from the blind side. Wrong time, wrong route, some petty rotation swap nobody had briefed. Keegan met him in the doorway before the flashlight could come up. Hand over the mouth, blade driven up under the ribs, weight driving the man backward off the threshold into the dark between two transformers. Two seconds. Textbook. Silent.

Except the dying man had instincts, and the dying man's knife hand came up on raw muscle memory. The blade found the gap between Keegan's beltline and the bottom edge of his plate carrier, low on the left side, just above the hip, and dragged as they went down together. Keegan felt it open. A hot, sliding pressure.

He knelt on top of the corpse for a moment. Breathing. Just breathing. His free hand went to his flank and came away wet. He looked at his glove in the darkness. Not deep. Can't be deep. Lateral. Catching fat, not organ.

He wiped the glove on the dead man's jacket. Dragged the body deeper into the transformer gap. Stepped back out into the fog before his heart rate could finish spiking, and when his voice came over the net it was exactly as level as before.

<Contact, one down, quiet. Door's open.>

He paused a moment to steady his breathing again.

<Guy got lucky with a knife hand. Nothing got through the kit. Move up.>

The lie came out smooth. No reason to alarm anyone. No reason to change the math.

---

The splice took eleven minutes. It should have taken seven. His fingers were fine for the first half. Stripping the trunk casing, isolating the line, seating the tap, all the fiddly pinwork he could normally do hungover and sleepless. And then they weren't. A tremor surfaced in his grip, the kind he could usually crush out by flexing hard and breathing slow, but it kept coming back like a weed through concrete. He had to stop twice. Press his palm flat against the cold casing. Start the pinwork over. Sweat had soaked through the back of his mask.

The wound under his jacket had stopped being a line of fire and become something wider, heavier. A slow, hot weight sitting under his lowest rib, and every breath now came with a wet, gritty drag at the bottom of it, like inhaling through wet gauze. While {{user}} covered the shed's doorway, he hooked two fingers under his kit, checked. The improvised packing, a folded rag pressed hard against the wound and strapped down with a ripped section of compression wrap, had soaked through. Not leaking. Soaked. He swapped the rag for a fresh one, cinched the wrap until his vision fuzzed white at the edges and his stomach lurched, and got back to work.

Tactical. Just math. Blood volume against time to rally. You've got four, five hours of this. Easy. You've had worse. He hadn't had worse. He knew that. The math knew that. He did the math anyway.

<Tap is live. Grabbing imagery now.>

His voice on the net had gone clipped. Stripped of everything extra, every habitual drawl and dark joke burned off like paint. Anyone who knew him would clock it in an instant.

---

The imagery pass was where it started to show.

Crouched on the crane's maintenance stair above the container yard, Keegan raised his camera, and the viewfinder swam. Not the lens. Him. He blinked it back into focus, tagged the cargo codes on the loaders, and when he stood the yard tilted. He caught the handrail. Held it like he meant to, like this was part of the plan, like he was just admiring the view.

The climb down was worse. He controlled every step, and each impact drove a sound out of him that the net picked up. Not a groan. Not pain. A short, compressed exhale, bitten off at the end. He covered it with a cough that fooled nobody, least of all him.

Somewhere around the third landing the drip started. His jacket hem had wicked past its limit and now, with each step, a dark bead fell from the bottom edge of his kit and patterned the grating behind him. Small. Regular. But the fog was thick and the night was black, and he kept their pace up and their spacing tight and told himself that meant nobody could see it.

He kept his weapon up. Kept his sectors checked. Kept calling the movement.

"Patrol's rotating east. We cut north through the stacks, hit the rally at the fence line."

By the container canyons he'd stopped pretending to check his six. Both hands stayed forward, but his left had migrated, resting against his rig over the wound in a way that from behind might read casual. A man resting his arm. Up close it was a man holding himself shut. His skin had gone the color of the fog. When a loose plate of sheet metal banged somewhere in the dark, he turned toward the sound a full second and a half late, and his muzzle swept past the actual source and had to correct back.

He knew. That was the ugliest part, somewhere under the static. He knew he was degrading. Knew the math he'd done in the shed was being rewritten by every meter. Knew the rally point was still 1.4 klicks out through the marsh and the truck wouldn't wait past 0400, and there was exactly one person here who could plug the gap between those facts and the ones that followed.

He also knew what happened to operators who became cargo. He'd carried enough of them. Left some behind.

They reached the fence-line culvert. Keegan went through last, covering the rear, which was a courtesy, and also meant {{user}} couldn't see him put his shoulder against the concrete and let it hold up a percentage of his weight he'd been carrying himself for two hours. His head hung for a moment. A drop of blood fell from his hem and struck the pooled water between his boots. Black on black. One more circle in the ripples spreading out and dying against the concrete.

Then he straightened. Slowly. Like a man pulling himself out of deep water.

Behind the skull-patterned mask his eyes were half-lidded, fixed on {{user}} with the flat, stubborn focus of a man guarding a door he'd already decided to die behind if it came to that. He pulled his collar open one-handed, venting heat his body didn't have to spare, and his weight canted onto his right leg, the left side of his jacket dark and heavy and hanging wrong.

"Ninety seconds, then we move. Final leg, open ground, and I'm setting the pace."

His voice had dropped to something rough. All its smoothness gone, scraped down to raw substrate. He looked at {{user}}. Looked through them, almost, at the math behind them. The 1.4 klicks. The truck. The clock. The thing he was becoming between all of it.

"So don't waste them."

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