<There you are,> she thought triumphantly.

Midii was now Shadowblade. Her body encased in tight armor but with loose-wrap clothing to hide her figure, her face well hidden by a dark ninja-style scarf wrapped securely around her face, head and neck. Her hands and forearms were protected by gauntlets which also served the double purpose of sheathing several small, well-balanced throwing blades. She also wore brass knuckles over her gloved hands with small points on them. Her upper arms also had armbands with hidden knives and a thin wire garrote. And that was merely her arms alone. She had more weapons secreted about her body. She had an illegal handgun with a silencer on it strapped to her thigh with its mate in a shoulder holster, a small plasma weapon hidden in a holster at the small of her back, over it hung a large projectile plasma rifle with laser guiding and a detachable semiautomatic slug thrower just in case she missed with the plasma. The straps across her chest that held the gun and her other weapon in place were covered in either extra rounds of ammunition or extra throwing knives. She also had a sharp, deadly kodachi slung across her back and it was that weapon she used to take the heads of her prey so that she could store them in a cryo box to be preserved so she could collect her bounty. Her belt also held weapons as did the tops of her boots and the armor protecting her thighs and knees and even the pectoral armor that covered her breasts. She was deadly from head to toe.

She watched her intended prey, a degenerate general from the wars who had sent his men out to die on purpose under the pay of a mobile suit factory. The more suits that were lost, the more the military had to buy to replace them. The General had gotten a cut of the take, but now his old business partner in that particular strategy wanted the man who knew too much to be eliminated. That was fine with Midii; the man was going to reward her handsomely and she intended to kill her employer soon after, for there was a sizable bounty out for his head due to his having cheated another business chum of his from all of that other guys ill gotten gains.

“Mary-Lou, Mary-Lou, I can’t go on singin’ without you…” the soon-to-be-corpse sang drunkenly as he stumbled out of the bar he’d just spent the evening in.

<Heh, he’s accompanied by bodyguards,> she noted as she slipped from shadow to shadow, watching her prey, and waiting. The night was her ally as she silently picked off the four guards one by one. The first had strayed from the light of the street lamps while his friend’s backs were turned and Shadowblade covered his mouth from behind and snapped his neck. There was no room for mercy in this game; these men would kill her in a second if she didn’t do it first. They earned their money their way, she earned hers her way. They were weaker than her and not aware enough so that was just how it went. The second body guard managed to get out a muffled sound before the tips of Midii’s fingers found the sensitive spot just under and behind the ears and sent a long sharp metal spike into it; she didn’t want to waste any of her knives on a mere body guard. The third and fourth were alerted by now so Shadowblade made short work of them. The long knife at her right thigh slid cleanly up into guard number three’s chin, all the way up into his brain before she removed it and plunged it into guard number four’s throat. A small gurgling sound was all he made as he joined his compatriots on the ground.

Midii wasn’t certain if she should feel pleased or a little disappointed that the General never knew what hit him.

A scant minute later she had all five heads in a portable cryo unit she’d stashed nearby. She doubted that these guards had any bounties out on them, but it never hurt to check and she hated for her kills to go to waste if there were any chance at all she might be able to turn a profit from it. Waste not, want not after all. Midii fastidiously wiped the blood from her armor as she walked to the darkened offices of her employer. She still had a little more work to do yet this night…

Midii nearly chortled with glee as she counted all of her winnings for the entire series later that evening from a secured position in one of her many safe hideaways. She so rarely had such a good paying series of hits in such quick succession. Sometimes it was months before she got a lead worth her trouble and here were two fat fish that had flopped right into her boat. Not only that, but when she checked the lists not just one but two of her incidental kills had been worth something. Guard number one had had a hit out for him for roughly seven years, not a large one, only five hundred credits, but still it would go a ways to providing food for her family. Then there had been a body guard working for Midii-Shadowblade’s ex-employer that had also had a 650 credit price on his head (small potatoes in the bounty hunter world) that Midii had had to kill in order to reach his boss. General Kerber and his partner in crime Quintus Lake had been worth a tidy sum. The first had been a 2500 credit hit and the second had been worth 3570 credits. Midii debated just handing in the towel and going back home with her gleanings so far, she’d be able to take a break, spend time with her family before she had to go back out into the field and finish earning this semester’s pay towards the Consortium debt. After taking another look at some of the current posts on the lists Midii decided to remain out in the field. There were times when there were no good hits out on the list, and pickings were so slim that even the little fish were fought over, Midii took her recent spurt of good fortune and the fact that the lists were practically bulging with nice wonderful big hits that would support her family as a sign that luck was with her and this was her big chance to get a hold of a lot of money. It would be nice to get ahead for once, not have to scramble desperately after a lot of small bounties come crunch time or look into the bare pantry of her home and the rail thin forms of her brothers and just wish to hang her head in shame for not being able to provide for them better. Plus, the shuttle tickets she used to track down her victims when she couldn’t find enough in one area cost money too.

Four nights and twelve cold dead bodies later Midii found herself stowed away aboard a cargo freighter headed down to Earth…destination: Hanjok, one of the seamiest cities this side of New Vegas. Any vice and every vice was catered to somewhere in that place; it was the perfect place to disappear, and the perfect place to find someone who had disappeared. All that was needed was a ready bribe and a deadly reputation and all the information she needed would be at her fingertips. Midii was on a bit of a victory high. Right then, she was the most successful and the richest that she had ever been. Of those twelve decapitated bodies, six were target kills; of those six target kills; four were worth big money. She had now over ten thousand in credits from the collection of the bounties; that was enough to buy food for her family to last an entire four months plus still have money left over to pay up the next two months rent and half of the semester debt to the Consortium. So she decided to get a little greedy. One more big kill would be enough to finish off this semesters payment months in advance… meaning she wouldn’t have to go out on hunt for a whole four solid months! Midii Une would be able to stay at home with her family for a nice long vacation, she wouldn’t have to do much more than work the occasional odd job to earn money to eat. She could at last feel a whole meal in her stomach instead of living off rice and bean curd, half rationing it so that it would last a little longer because every meal she didn’t buy for herself was one more meal she could buy for her family. She could go fishing or perhaps even spend a day at the beach. She could be a girl again!

<So this is it,> she thought as she silently stared at the picture of the face posted on the lists that all bounty hunters used to find out the latest hits and who was dead and who was not and how much they were worth. Jeric Kaneda, a business man with a background in assassination. His preferred weapons were poison darts and poison blades.

<He must be somewhere in this city, that guy I threatened let it slip. The big enchilada; sixty thousand credits. Man, someone must really want him dead if they’re offering that much just for a bounty. Then again, this guy has a bit of a rep of his own… It probably makes a lot of the usual crowd of ordinary Bounty Hunters a little reluctant to take him on,> she considered.

Well she wasn’t afraid. She was worth more dead than alive anyway. She’d had her father take out life insurance on her for a very large sum of money, large enough to pay off the debt and buy out the house. If she died they could collect the money and use it to live in peace. Midii had put aside her feelings of guilt and worthlessness aside when she was young but there was still an inner core of strength inside of her that wouldn’t let her give up on her life. So maybe it wasn’t great, maybe she was always half-starved and scraping for money to feed her family and pay for her sick father’s medical treatments, maybe she was a remorseless bounty hunter who killed so casually it gave people the chills whenever they met her gaze, and maybe she felt so empty and alone sometimes without the closeness of human contact that it made her want to curl up into a fetal position and weep… but in the end she always felt she had to keep on living. She was just too damned stubborn to give up.

“This is my stop,” Midii murmured to herself as she put away her palmtop and prepared to sneak out without anyone noticing. That sixty-thousand credits was practically hers!

* * *

Trowa looked over at the man he’d been surreptitiously tailing for the better part of two days. The fellow who had no discernable features wasn’t Kaneda himself, but Trowa knew from the paper trail in the man’s accounts that he would likely be meeting up with Kaneda in the very near future, probably this very evening. The man made his living by forging incredible fake identities that were all but impossible to trace or disprove, and in a city like Hanjok a professional of his caliber was in high demand. Mask (for that was the only name the little man went by) was a master of disguise and trickery,  Mask was completely and utterly average… average height, average build, his face was neither handsome nor ugly, and Mask used that very middling-ness to make himself invisible. He could make himself taller or shorter, change his skin and hair color, even his gender, with the application of a some make-up or homemade prosthetics, a costume change and some very good acting. He also performed the same services for others in a way; the papers and fake identity cards disguised his clients as effectively as Mask’s own tricks disguised him.

Mask wasn’t the only one good at disguise however. Trowa knew more than a few tricks of the trade himself, and so every time that Mask had changed forms; gone into a bathroom or a resteraunt looking one way and then slipping out among a crowd looking completely different, Trowa had been able to keep up with him. Trowa was certain that Mask didn’t know he was being followed. And now… Trowa’s diligence was about to pay off. Unless he missed his guess, Mask would be meeting with Kaneda tonight to hand over in person the fake identity he’d made to order and then Trowa could follow him and….

<There he is!> Trowa thought as a tall, thin man with dark hair slicked back into a ponytail reaching to the middle of his back, small narrow eyes and the demeanor of a trained killer entered the room. Kaneda lit a small cigarette and took a drag as he habitually glanced around him. Trowa was hidden by a small knot of people playing cards and drinking, even though his vista of the rest of the room was limited he could see what he needed to. Kaneda took a seat at a small table in the back of the room then signaled a waitress, requesting two drinks.

<That’s probably the code-signal for opening dialogue,> Trowa thought as he observed them surreptitiously over the rim of his own drink. Sure enough, a few seconds after the waitress brought the requested drinks to the small table, Mask walked up to the slick-haired man and murmured some kind of code sentence to which Kaneda gave the scripted reply and the two men sat down to discuss business.

Trowa had spotted several discrete body guards of Kaneda positioned around the room, so Trowa already knew that trying to take him by force from out of the bar was a futile plan foredoomed to failure. He’d have to get Kaneda while he was out on the streets tonight. Kaneda didn’t look like the kind of man who was going to go down easily, and the guards he’d hired were all hardened professionals, veterans of many successful jobs.

Mask signaled for another drink, and the waitress, a different one this time…

<Exceptionally pretty, but her uniform looks a little too small,> Trowa noted absently with his trained eye for detail, even though the bulk of his concentration was on reading the conversation between Kaneda and Mask. The waitress brought another two drinks, and then started flirting with the customers at the table next to Kaneda as the two dangerous men got on with their discussion.

<I almost wish I were the waitress right now, she’s in the perfect position to overhear everything they’re saying. Mask’s prosthetic lips are difficult to read,> thought Trowa. A few minutes later, Trowa wondered if it was a coincidence that the waitress moved off to other things just as Mask and Kaneda finished the important part of their discussion. A few minutes later, she was wandering around with a tray of drinks, going to each of Kaneda’s guards. She was giving each of them a drink with a wink and a flirt that made them sit back and sip absentmindedly at the proffered beverages while they admired the pretty waitress in the tight uniform.

A few minutes later, the waitress disappeared, presumably because her shift was over, and Trowa dismissed her from his mind to concentrate on the information he had gleaned that night. Kaneda would be meeting with a few of his old “associates” from the wars later that evening and pier 12 on the wharf. Kaneda probably wanted to discuss ways of getting hold of the rest of his ill-gotten gains and setting himself up under a completely different identity. Kaneda probably figured that he’d already shaken all pursuit by now and wanted to go back to his life of luxury.

Trowa would have to follow Kaneda on his trip through the streets and pick off his guards one by one then hopefully he could take down the man himself, if not then the assignment might take a while. Either way, the time to strike was tonight, before Kaneda could become too firmly entrenched to be dug out without a lot of legal red tape. In a place like Hanjok people often went there to disappear without any questions; and no one asked questions if someone disappeared. Trowa intended to make Kaneda disappear right into the nearest Preventors holding cell.