Christiaan looked to his team leader (TL), who directed them to force the locals into a line on their knees.

"Identification cards, Now!" Christiaan barked, and petrified civilians whimpered as they fumbled for credentials. A mother frantically tried to soothe a screaming baby while she fished out her I.D. with one hand.

"Let's go!" the team lead barked. Four fire teams from the Vortex Rider had been assigned to the metropolis near the geothermal plant. Christiaan snatched five cards before handing them to his TL, who cross-referenced a file on his tablet, searching the roster by name.

Moderate value. A note read beside a man's name. That meant they likely wouldn't liquidate them, but they could if they didn't meet their quota.

The TL tossed the card to the ground and searched for the next one — a white woman with short hair and sunken eyes.

Her name and public picture materialized on the screen with notes: multiple drug charges, unemployed, weak genetic contribution. A banner across the top and bottom flashed in red— low value.

Christiaan looked up at the TL, who nodded in affirmation. Christiaan drew his pistol and singled the woman out of the kneeling lineup. Christiaan used to tell himself he hated this part of his job but had moved beyond that long ago. Joberg could not support its current population, and low-value denizens would ultimately destroy it. Joberg was one of many states under the Coral Corsair's care and would do whatever he could to ensure its survival.

The woman shivered as she looked up at him, red lightly flashing in her wide, light blue eyes.

"Please," she choked correctly, assuming what he wanted from her.

Christiaan raised his pistol.

The red emergency lights flicked off, and contingency generators whined as they powered down, plunging the road into darkness.

Christiaan cursed and fished out his flashlight. Around him, other Corsairs clicked powerful white beams on, briefly blinding, blinking civilians. Something clattered to the metal grate flooring behind him, and Christian whirled, illuminating a scaffolding, inky black steel construction site.

"Hello?" Christian called. Whoever's hiding, show yourself. I promise things will be a lot worse for you if we have to drag you out.

Something shifted in the darkness, and Christiaan spotlighted him with his flashlight. A male figure stood with his back turned. Christiaan's comrades on either side raised their carbines, but he raised a hand to stop them from firing.

"Show yourself," Christiaan prompted, and the man took short, choppy steps to spin. The figure wore a scarf across his light brown nose and mouth with a grinning shark maw painted across it. The flashlight twinkled in the man's wide eyes as he let out a muffled cry.

"What the?" one of Christian's comrades lined his iron sights on the anomaly. They were supposed to focus on low-value targets but would take measures to protect themselves if threatened.

"Wait!" Christiaan said as he noticed the metallic cuffs restraining the man's wrists. "He's one of ours; I recognize him from the Eel Fang's crew."

A series of pressurized hisses spat through the air, and four shadowy quarrels darted down from different points on the scaffolding. Vortex Rider crewmen cried out as harpoons either lodged in their armor or found soft flesh in a gap. Cables reeled, ripping four corsairs from their feet into the shadows.

"Fire!" the TL cried, and hatches opened in buildings around them. A harpoon took the corsair to Christian's right and whisked him into a darkened doorway, where he screamed but was quickly silenced.

Christiaan jammed his pistol in its holster and unslung his carbine. He fired at the scaffolding's dark shelves, but the bright flashes of fire didn't illuminate anyone up there. He stepped back, tightening their defensive position. Another hiss, scream, and zip, and a corsair was dragged away from the group.

"TL," Christiaan said as he turned to his commander, who was firing at an open doorway. Behind him, a demon melded into existence.

"Look out!" Christiaan cried.

The demon — a wide-shouldered man in dark colors with a shark grin mask and goggles slapped the TL's weapon down and drew a matte grey knife across his throat. The TL dropped, trying to staunch the blood spraying from his neck, and the shark smiler snatched the TL's pistol from its holster before he hit the ground and sunk two rounds into the downed man.

"No!" Christiaan cried as he sighted the assassin. The dark figure spun and weaved as Christiaan unloaded. A pipe smashed Christiaan's barrel up, ramming his iron sight into his eye, and he staggered. Another man, a full head taller than Christiaan and at least a hundred pounds heavier shoved him back.

More men spilled onto the road, all with scarves painted with shark teeth.

Shark grin scarfs swarmed the scene, mostly fighting with knives and blunt instruments. One of Christiaan's comrades dropped four of these new assailants in a single spray from his R5, but the enemy quickly overran the corsairs.

The behemoth bear hugged Christiaan, and the world spun as he slammed Christiaan into the ground. Air fled Christiaan's lungs, and he choked.

Silence fell as quickly as it started. The red rotary lights whined back to life, illuminating the carnage. One of the attackers grabbed Christiaan's dropped carbine.

Coms, he had to warn the others. He reached for his receiver when rough hands seized him and dragged him to his feet. Christiaan gasped, his lungs finally catching up to his body.

The one who killed the TL stared at him through green-tinted goggles.

"Who —" Christiaan choked, but the leader of this vicious band cut him off.

"Are you an Eel Fang or a Vortex rider?'

Christiaan had to strain to hear Shark Face's soft words.

"Vortex," He stammered, his shock of capture making him forget counter-interrogation protocol.

"What's your radio call sign?"

"It's fossil tide." His brain caught up to his adrenaline. "How do you know our vessel's names?"

Shark Face's eyes hardened, and he drew his knife across Christiaan's throat.

Christiaan bucked, wet warmth spilling down his kneck. The large one who held him let him sink to the floor. Why was the temperature dropping so fast? His body buzzed, tingled, and then went numb. Through blurring tunnel vision, he watched this shark-faced gange strip the armor of his fallen comrades and then don it themselves. Why would they do that?

********

"Move, Domcop!" Johan barked as he pulled Thulani around the corner in a narrow corridor. A bullet deflected off wall plating, and a hot fragment clipped Thulani's forehead. Thulani flinched and touched the spot, his fingers coming back only slightly slick.

"We need to find a place to hide," Thulani said.

"Hide?" Johan snapped, "Are you dumb? I'm going to kill them all." He hoisted his wrench. Thulani wasn't sure if the wadded paper in both nostrils made him look absurd or terrifying.

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

"You see when that other team split off? They're flanking us. This corridor circles back to the bay." Thulani flicked the safety lever on his new pistol, this time exposing a red dot. The gun wasn't the original one he had failed to fire but the one discarded in Johan's brawl. He hooked his arm around the corner and pulled the trigger, illuminating the hall with flashes until the pistol stopped firing. He didn't try to hit anyone, just make them think twice about advancing. He pulled the weapon back with its slide-locked to the rear. The chances that he struck an enemy were dismally small, but the returning hail of gunfire indicated their pursuers had stopped.

"There's no way they're surrounding us; they don't know our territory," Johan insisted.

"I don't know; they seem to know much more than they should. I wouldn't be surprised if they have maps." Thulani should have grabbed an extra magazine.

"Let's go, pod boy," Johand stomped down the hall."

"Wait! We should find an escape route. If we keep going that way, we'll run into the other team."

Johan swung his wrench, breaking the valve on a power generation heat duct.

Thulani hurried after him. Voices around the corner called for caution as they pressed on.

Johan shattered a second valve halfway down.

"Let's go!" Thulani urged.

Johan continued several paces, snapped a third valve, and stopped at a maintenance hatch.

Thulani shook his head. "No good. There's no room to hide, and it's a dead end.

Johan rolled his eyes, grabbed Thulani's jumpsuit in a meaty hand, and pulled him into the closet.

"Johan, this is a death trap!" Thulani hissed in a whisper.

Juhan grunted with a glare and held a finger to his lips.

A mess of mops and buckets adorned one corner of the closet. Pressure wheels and pipes elbowed from the floor and disappeared into the back wall.

Thulani's fingers drifted to close the door, but Johan checked him with the wrench and shook his head. Great, Thulani would die in a mop closet with an actual ape.

A flashlight beam shined down the hall. "Clear!" a voice called, and boots clinked against the extended metal grating. The walls closed in around Thulani. He glanced at the mops, a base instinct driving him to burrow into them and bury himself even though he knew he couldn't adequately obscure himself.

The boots drew closer.

"Open door left!"

"Covering."

Johans grinned wickedly and hoisted the wheel to his side. The duct opened, and pressurized steam hissed out the ruptured valves. Their pursuers screamed as superheated vapors blasted the hallway.

Johan took a deep breath and threw himself into the scolding haze.

Thulani stagged back to the mop corner. Crazy — Johan was actually crazy. Thulani grabbed a flimsy hollow aluminum mop pole and brandished it like a sword.

Johan snarled; someone screamed, and then automatic rifle fire flashed, defused by the swirling light box in the doorway.

Thulani settled into his makeshift stance, preparing to charge. Who was he kidding? Him fighting trained gunmen with a mop? He thought back to Olivia. He'd never see her again or meet their child — even the idea of never seeing Nandi as ridiculous as his sister could be tore at him.

He bounced on his toes as more gunfire flashed in the steam. An impact and a grunt sounded, followed by slow, heavy footsteps. A figure darkened the hatchway.

Thulany fixed Olivia's face in his mind, reared his mop, and screamed defiantly.

Johan stepped into the closet, his white skin now pink and his eyes bloodshot from the heat.

Thulani gapped, then recoiled as a stream of blood squirted from a hole in the mechanic's kneck.

"You're shot!" Thulani cried.

"Hmm?" Johan reached up and found the hole, fountaining blood in spurts. "Oh, yeah." He shoved a thumb into the wound, stemming the flow.

Thulani watched, jaw dropped, then spun and threw up.

Johan hooked his wrench into his tool belt and cranked the wheel, suppressing the hiss from the hallway, his thumb, a permanent fixture in the hole in his neck. He spat bloody saliva. "Need to go back the way we came." His voice tore, strained, and raspy. "If they're surrounding us, they'll hope to run into us on this side."

"We need to find you a WAFAK," Thulani coughed and spat bile-laden saliva.

"Later," Johan rasped. "Let's kill more of them."

Thulani gave the mechanic a wide berth and stepped into the hallway. Two marauders lay motionless on the ground, the third impaled on one of the broken gaskets in the wall. Thulani held his breath and grabbed his mouth and his stomach as his body itched to retch.

They hurried down the hall, though Johan staggered a few times. Thulani scanned every wall they passed, looking for a WAFAK, but found none.

He ticked a dile on the communications box he took from the leader, combing from channels. He picked up on two raider frequencies, but the group in pursuit hopped channels once they realized Thulani had an earpiece. Thulani didn't know how these devices worked but determined they didn't connect to the hard line. Did the attackers have a hard line of their own?

They returned to the bay; Thulani glanced up at the breach hole but saw no sign of the marksman from before.

"Get the doors open," a voice barked. Four raiders stood at the system pannel Thulani had initially used to bypass the security protocol. Not far from the panel, Thshepo's body lay where Thulani had left it, but the bandits had cut down the man Johan hung from the crane.

Thulani ducked and pulled Johan down behind a forklift. The mechanic wheezed and squinted to see the raiders bent on their task.

Thulani switched the dile on the enemy com box and finally found this group's new channel.

"What's the progress on the payment?" The female leader's familiar voice demanded?

One of the bandits — no, soldiers; after watching them, Thulani could no longer think of them as mere pirates — grabbed his receiver.

"This system is ancient and confusing,"

Thulani heard his voice twice. Once echoed across the bay and again mixed with static in his ear.

"Can't we just bring in new techs to do it for us?"

"Good Idea, Remmber. How well did that go last time?" The commander snapped. "Did anyone flush those two who got away?"

Johan grabbed Thulani's arm, not privy to the conversation, and Thulani waved him away.

"Ah Shit," a new voice crackled over static. "Commander Parker, They got team two."

The corridor they abandoned, leaving corpses, flashed in Thulani's mind. The flanking team must have caught up.

"Who the hell are these people?" Commander Parker demanded, her voice sharp. "Find them and ice them, Alex!"

"Good copy, ma-am."

Tired of being ignored, Johan pulled the helmet from Thulani's head, painfully ejecting the earpiece.

"Hey," Thulani hissed.

"This is what you're going to do, pod boy," he rasped, his eyes glazed and a slow trickle of blood running down his thumb lodged in his kneck. "You're going to power up every crane, every lift, every saw, and any piece of heavy machinery you can find in this dock," he rasped. "And you've got to do it without being seen."

Thulani gaped. "We've already gotten around our pursuers. We can lose them in the metropolis. You need medical!"

"Nah," Johan drolled, bloody drool dripping from his mouth. "You're going to make as much noise as possible."

"Why?" Thulani whispered, tempted to abandon his mysterious companion. "What will you do?" If Johan was difficult as a coworker, he was a nightmare when burned, broken, and bleeding out.

Johan grinned, exposing blood-caked teeth. "I'm going fishing."

********

Frans pushed his round spectacles up his nose. What was he doing? How had he gotten roped into working with Cornelius Vermeulen, not to mention at a time of crisis? Gunfire echoed down the corridor, and Frans flinched.

"Relax!" the skinny man croaked, simultaneously looking childlike and ancient. "We're not going to let anything happen to you." Two of the man's teeth crossed, and one was missing, making his smile feel unhygienic.

Bodyguards? They were more like captors. Frans wired the second port Mr. Vermeulen had given him to the pod's control panel, the wires spilling and exposed. Mr. Vermeulen had hired some second-rate wanna-be systems tech to build the ports, and the software was sloppy at best, but its function wasn't exactly complex.

He glanced nervously at the piled canisters that occupied most of the space in the small sub. Frans was no demolitions tech, but he noticed several labels with O2. Flame needed fuel, and this work-pod-converted bomb had plenty.

"Okay, it's ready!" Frans muttered and eased his way back out the man hatch as the skinny man dropped six or several slow burn flares on the ground.

Frans was a systems tech, so how did he find himself making weapons? Mr. Vermeulen was slimy and no doubt planning behind the council's backs. This was treason. Sweat drenched Frans' armpits and sides.

The skinny man ignited the engine, and the sub lurched in its clamp as the port tried to cruise toward a specific radar signature.

Frans was tempted to throw the hatch, sealing his criminal babysitter inside the iron tomb. His hand itched to do it, but he restrained himself. He had already committed his sins and would condemn himself if he tried to move against Mr. Vermeulen.

The skinny man climbed the reclined steps to the hall, and his counterpart exited the first pod.

This second "bodyguard" stood a foot taller than Frans. Her dark skin absorbed the red emergency light, and she glared at him over a shark grin scarf mask. Her long, ropy extensions swayed as she sealed the hatch. The skinny man slammed his hatch, rolling the wheel, and the three left the decompression chamber to the lower control doc, where Frans looked at the control panel, a warning flashing that the subs strained against the docking clamps.

"I'll not do it," Frans whispered. "One of you —"

The woman slammed her fist on the yellow-striped release button, and Frans looked out the porthole window as the submarines launched away from Joeburg.

What had he done?