The transport bay smelled like stale coffee and gun oil. Caleb sat on the bench across from Hiro, the bypass module on his wrist showing yellow at ninety-nine point one, and watched Hassek’s two flank-support men adjust their plates without acknowledging anyone in the squad.

The man with the burn scar checked his magazine with the slow rhythm of someone who had nothing to be nervous about.

Hiro leaned his rifle against his knee. "You’re tighter than usual."

"Bad sleep," Caleb said.

Iharu snorted from the seat next to Hiro. "Bad sleep for him is the first time he’s slept all week."

Hassek stood at the front of the bay, helmet under his arm, one boot propped on the ammunition crate. His glance at Caleb lasted half a second. He went back to checking his comms unit. The bandage on his neck had been changed again.

The pilot’s voice cut over the cabin speakers. "Sector six in two minutes. LZ is the south staging yard. Class-three territorial Yoju, single, contained on the south end of the structure. Standard suppress and clear."

Caleb pulled his harness tighter. The dagger sat against his kidney where Tali’s mesh hid the resonance. He breathed past it.

The transport set down in the gravel lot of a decommissioned freight yard. Cranes loomed over rusted shipping containers in irregular rows. The wind carried old machine oil and something organic underneath it.

The squad fanned out. Hassek’s two men took the right flank. Hiro and Iharu took the left. Caleb held the center.

The Yoju’s tracks were on the gravel. Heavy four-print pattern, Class-three weight, the right rear leg dragging the way they did when they fed too long.

Caleb followed them.

The kill marks started fifty meters in.

Three carcasses, bunched in a tight cluster, opened along the same axis. Wrong placement. A territorial Yoju marked its perimeter, scratched walls, sprayed corners, dragged half-eaten kills to the boundary like fence posts. These were center-yard. Visible from every angle.

Caleb crouched next to the closest carcass. Yoju mandibles tore in spirals. These cuts were straight. Industrial blade. He pressed two fingers into the gravel beside it. Dry. The blood had been wiped before it pooled, the way a butcher cleaned a yard before customers arrived.

Someone had killed them and arranged them. Hours ago. With time to clean.

His comms ticked. "South perimeter clear," Hiro reported.

"East clear," Iharu said.

Hassek’s flank gave a flat: "West clear."

Caleb keyed his channel. "Hold position. The Yoju isn’t here for the freight. It’s been baited."

Iharu’s voice cut in. "Baited by who?"

"Doesn’t matter. Stay tight."

The Yoju shrieked from the north stack of containers.

Caleb caught the spatial geometry before he caught the sound. The bait pile sat in a direct line between the north stacks and Hiro’s perimeter position. The kill scene was a sight line. The Yoju had been hiding in the stacks, watching the whole approach, waiting for someone to bend over the carcasses.

A sniper hide.

"Hiro, drop." Caleb keyed the line.

Static answered him.

His comms had cut. Iharu’s had too, judging by the channel signature. Two flat tones where two voices should have been.

Hassek’s flank channel stayed open.

The Yoju came over the top of the container in a single bound. Eight feet of muscle and chitin, mandibles wide, dropping toward Hiro from above with the angle of an avalanche.

Hiro’s rifle came up. He fired. The rounds skipped off the chest plating because the underside was the only soft target and Hiro was directly under it.

Two seconds.

The bypass module was warm against Caleb’s wrist. Burning it would solve the next ten seconds and cost everything after.

He turned away from it.

The yard had three gantry cranes, all decommissioned, all locked at zero load. He had walked under one of them on the way in. The hydraulic clamp at the end of its arm hung two stories up, magnetic, suspended over the row of containers Hiro had just stepped past.

The lock on a decommissioned gantry was a manual pin in the base. Disposal-yard standard. Caleb had pulled a thousand of them.

He sprinted.

His shoulder hit the base of the gantry as the Yoju cleared the container roof. He drove his weight into the manual release. The pin sheared. The hydraulic line dumped pressure with a sound like a tire blowing, and the recoil through the metal frame rang up his arm and into his teeth.

The crane arm fell.

The clamp came down at full weight on the Yoju’s mid-section as it landed. The thing folded around the impact. A wet crack ran across the yard. Its legs scrabbled against the gravel. The mandibles opened and closed without noise, the chest cavity collapsed under the weight of the clamp.

It pinned. It did not die.

Caleb pulled himself off the base. "Hiro. Iharu. Underside. It’s open."

Hiro’s rifle came up. Three rounds. The Yoju went still.

Iharu walked up from the east, scanning the stacks. He took in the pinned corpse, the gantry, and Caleb at the base of it, and asked nothing.

The comms clicked back online for everyone at the same time.

Hassek’s flank channel had been open the entire fight. 𝕗𝐫𝐞𝕖𝕨𝐞𝗯𝚗𝕠𝘃𝐞𝚕.𝐜𝗼𝚖

The pilot’s voice came through clean. "Squad, status?"

"Target down," Caleb said. "Heading to extraction."

Hiro caught up to him at the base of the gantry. The manual release was still under Caleb’s hand. Hiro registered that, registered the pinned Yoju behind them, drew breath as if to ask, and let it out without the question.

"Move," Caleb said.

The transport lifted thirty seconds later. The squad settled into their bay seats with the silence of men who had not yet decided what they had seen.

Iharu sat across from Caleb with his rifle across his knees. He worked his thumb along the safety, on and off, on and off, the way he did when he was thinking and could not say what he was thinking out loud yet.

Hiro stared at the floor of the bay. His hands rested on top of his rifle. He held them too still.

Caleb checked his wrist module under his sleeve.

Bypass: ninety-nine point one.

He had not spent it.

The public feed dashboard sat under the bypass display. Active subscribers had been climbing all morning. The graph cliffed off in the last two minutes. The kill had been clean, mechanical, and not visually interesting. The investor channel showed bid losses across three brackets.

The dashboard closed under his thumb.

His wrist pulsed.

[KIKARU: Compliance found a routing entity.]

[KIKARU: Single name. Attending tonight.]

[KIKARU: I need a positive ID. I can’t do it myself.]

The text held for a few seconds and dissolved.

His wrist pulsed again before he could pull his sleeve back down.

[UNKNOWN USER: Smart.]

[UNKNOWN USER: Don’t be smart with me tonight.]

The purple text stayed up longer than Kikaru’s had. It dissolved when it was ready, not when he closed it.

Across the bay, Hassek was watching him. The bandage on his neck had a fresh stain at the bottom edge that had not been there at the briefing.