SAT–MON, MAY 23–25, 2026
Marco had been running the Tampa drills every morning for two weeks by the time Dan arrived at the waterfront on Saturday. Marco sat in the upstairs office with the remote control unit on the desk in front of him and ran the Tampa through the industrial waterfront's open lanes at 06:00 AM when the area was empty enough for live runs that weren't going to attract attention. Dan watched from the upper window and made notes.
The dual minigun worked at fifteen hundred RPM with a response lag from the remote control of under a quarter-second. Marco had learned to compensate for the lag by leading moving targets with the turret rather than tracking them directly, the same principle as leading a moving target with a rifle, adjusted for the turret's specific rotation speed. He'd developed the technique on his own without being told, which was what happened when you put a person with an engineering background in charge of a mechanized weapons system.
The mortar was different. The arc calibration was the challenge, the rear-facing mortar fired in an arc whose range and angle were determined by the charge duration, and getting the shell to land at a specific point rather than in a general area required a feel for the charge timing that was harder to systematize than the minigun's rotation.
Marco had developed a mental table for the common distances: two hundred meters, one-fifty, one hundred, fifty. He called these out during the drills, running through each distance twice before moving to the next, building the muscle memory for the charge timing the same way Dan built muscle memory for everything, repetition until the body knew the answer without consulting the mind.
The mine dispenser was, as Dan had assessed during the planning phase, Marco's favorite feature. He deployed both modes across the Saturday drill, proximity mines first, EMP mines second, and he had the specific satisfaction of someone who had found the right tool. "The EMP mines," Marco said, during the debrief after the drill. "If we deploy them on the approach roads before they arrive, before anyone can see the car—"
"Their vehicles die at the perimeter," Dan said. "They come in on foot. Which means they're separated from their vehicles, which are their tactical advantage for egress, and they have to approach the building on foot in the dark through terrain they haven't reconnoitered."
Marco nodded. He had the expression he used for plans that matched his assessment, not enthusiasm, just confirmation. "How many of Tombstone's crew do you expect?"
"The intelligence puts his personal guard at eight to twelve men. Elite three-man rotation on close protection. The rest are trigger-happy but not trained." Dan looked at the tactical schematic on the desk. "The Tampa handles the bulk. Felicia handles the elites. The EMP mines handle the vehicles. I handle Tombstone."
"That leaves Sasha on the exit."
"Sasha on the exit with the armored sedan. If the Tampa goes down, she and you hold the extraction route."
Marco looked at the schematic. He had the jaw-scar on the left side that moved slightly when he was thinking through something complex, not a tell exactly, more a habit, the jaw working the problem. "He's going to come himself," Marco said. "Not because we've baited him to. Because this is personal for him. You took his money. You took his distribution point. You've been making noise through his network. He's going to want to close this personally."
"That's what I'm counting on," Dan said. "His ego is a variable that can be used."
Marco looked at him. Then he picked up the control unit. "Show me the deployment map again," he said. "I want to run the EMP mine placement sequence one more time."
They worked for another two hours. On Sunday afternoon, Dan was walking home through the streets near Red Hook when something three blocks away resolved itself through the ambient city noise: a figure moving fast through a crowd that was parting in a specific way, the kind of parting that happened when something very large and very urgent was coming through. Dan adjusted his route without breaking pace. He turned onto a cross-street and looked, from a distance, at the scene two blocks east.
Luke Cage. He recognized him from the news coverage, the specific build, the specific quality of movement, the yellow shirt that was not the most obvious choice for someone doing physical work in a New York street but which was apparently a consistent element of his operational aesthetic. He was breaking up something at a street corner, three men, a dispute that had escalated past the point where the participants were going to resolve it themselves, the kind of street-level incident that happened in this city several hundred times a day and which occasionally required someone with bulletproof skin to bring it to a conclusion.
It was over in forty seconds. Luke Cage said something Dan couldn't hear from his distance. The three men dispersed. The street reconstituted itself around the event the way streets always did, folding back into the ordinary traffic and pedestrian flow as if nothing had interrupted it. Dan watched the scene resolve and then turned back to his route and kept walking. He filed it in the ambient column: this city, its people, the scale of what existed here at every register simultaneously. He was the street-level operator in one lane. Luke Cage was the street-level superhero in another. Daredevil was in a third. All of them in the same city, on the same evening, doing the work their particular version of themselves had decided to do.
He found this clarifying rather than overwhelming. There was room, in a city this size, for many kinds of work. He had found his kind and he was doing it. This was enough.
On Monday he met Yara for lunch. He had texted her Sunday evening: 'tomorrow works if you're free.' She had replied in forty seconds: 'the hungarian pastry shop. one PM. don't be late i have a two o'clock.'
She was already there when he arrived, three minutes early, with a coffee and a notebook open to a page dense with diagrams he couldn't read from the door. She looked up and waved with the easy warmth that had characterized every interaction they'd had since orientation, the specific quality of someone who liked people genuinely and showed it without effort. He sat down across from her and she closed the notebook and looked at him with the particular attention of a person who had not seen someone in a while and was running an update.
"You look tired," she said. "But good tired. Like you've been doing something."
"Training," he said. "New programme."
"Mm." She accepted this the way she accepted most things he said about himself, at face value, without pressing, with the underlying quality of someone who knew there were things he didn't say and had decided his company was worth accepting on those terms. "Well. You missed a lot. The environmental science gossip is at an all-time high since the Upper Bay thing. Dr Chen has sent four department-wide emails in eight days which is basically a record."
"What's her current hypothesis?"
"Three competing ones, which is how you know she's genuinely worried. Also—" she leaned forward slightly, the posture she used for information she found particularly worth sharing, "—someone on the biology floor is apparently dating a government contractor. Like actual classified government work, nobody knows what kind. There have been very pointed conversations in the faculty lounge about non-disclosure agreements and whether dating someone with a security clearance creates complications for academic publishing."
He drank his coffee. "How do you know about the faculty lounge conversations?"
"I have a source," she said, with the serenity of someone who cultivated information networks as a hobby. "Also I was looking for a microwave at eleven PM and accidentally walked into what I can only describe as a very tense situation involving Professor Vasquez and a man in a very expensive suit who did not work at Columbia and was not happy about something." She paused. "The suit had that energy. You know the energy. Like the person wearing it has signed things."
He found himself genuinely entertained by this, which was a specific quality of time spent with Yara that he hadn't experienced in a while, the particular ease of a conversation that had no operational layer, no second meaning, no information to be managed. Just a person he liked telling him things about a world he was part of and which continued to be strange and interesting regardless of what else he had going on. He had needed this more than he'd realized.
They stayed until quarter to two. She gathered her notebook and her bag with the efficient speed of someone perpetually on a schedule. At the door she looked back at him. "Same time in two weeks?" she said. "I'm going to start scheduling you or you'll disappear again."
"Same time in two weeks," he said.
He walked back to campus through the May afternoon. Halfway across the park his phone showed a notification, a voice note from Felicia, sent fourteen minutes ago. He put in one earbud and played it.
She was somewhere with ambient noise behind her, something that sounded like a party, or a rooftop, or both simultaneously, the kind of place where conversations happened in the gaps between music and other conversations. She'd walked somewhere quieter to record the message: the background noise dropped mid-note and he heard her say, at full register rather than operational register: "I just remembered, I need the final breakdown on the Midtown buyer arrangement from the reliquary job. The accounting from February. There's a question about how one of the line items was classified. Call me when you're free." And then, before she ended the note, a fraction of a second of the background noise coming back, someone else's laugh, bright and close, and then the note cut off.
He listened to it twice. He had the accounting information she needed. He would call her when he was back at the warehouse and had the records in front of him. He filed the note and put the phone in his pocket and kept walking, and was aware, briefly, without making anything of it, that she was somewhere right now that was entirely her own, in a room full of people he would never meet, having an evening that had nothing to do with him, which was exactly as it should be and which was also, in some way he didn't have a useful word for, one of the more interesting things he'd learned about her.
He walked back to campus through the May afternoon and thought, briefly, that the city had given him something he hadn't planned for and couldn't have manufactured, people who existed in the ordinary register of his life, who required nothing from him except presence and honesty within the limits he could offer. He had those people now. He had built that without a plan, which meant it had built itself, which was the best way for things like that to arrive.