Daud is at the channel marker when Brine comes up the north lane, same as last time, and for once he does not deliver the news like weather. The bloom broke a week ago. Eleven months of dark green mats saying things in other people's voices, and then, without warning, the water went quiet and let the light through. He has been waiting so long to say something other than bad news that he almost forgets to say it at all.
She has the gel this time. Two charges of it, requisitioned off the last contract's own after-action, sitting in a case she has checked three times since the boat left the dock. The Bureau does not usually listen to a diver's workbench notes. This time it did.
The corridor she nearly died in a month ago reads different in real light. She goes in at the same half speed, reading the street before she swims it, and this time the water answers her honestly instead of hiding the primary until it is already looking back. She finds it on the second read, holding the same patient patrol it held in June, and for the first time she gets to choose the moment instead of the moment choosing her.
She is not alone in the corridor. A second boat sits off the wreck line that was not there last time, running quieter than Daud's, and Daud clocks it before she does. The Menagerie came back. They lost this contract to a colony of angry sea-eagles once, and Daud says, in the flat voice of a man who has met these people before and did not enjoy it, that they do not plan on losing it twice.
The Menagerie's crew works fast and works quiet, three of them in matched gear, and the one running point moves like she has done this before in worse water. Cage does not shout orders. She barely gestures. When the eagle colony wakes on schedule, the same colony that mobbed the rivals into the ground last month, a pair of hooded net-drones goes up off Cage's boat before the first bird clears its nest, and the corridor stays calm that should not have. Whatever saved Brine in June is not going to save her twice, and she understands that the moment she sees the drones deploy.
So it becomes a straight race, the kind this hunt never let her run before. The primary is holding its patrol line between two collapsed towers, the Resonance Core visible through a gap in its plating for anyone patient enough to read it clean, and both boats know exactly where that gap is. Cage's crew closes from the wreck line. Brine closes from the channel. Neither of them is faster in open water. What decides it is who has spent the last month thinking about nothing else.
She has. She does not chase the primary this time, because chasing is what put her in the shark's corridor a month ago and she has not forgotten the lesson even if the desk's dice made her pay for it twice. She reads the tower gap instead, banks the approach the way the last report said to bank it, and comes up under the Core node from the blind side while the primary is still watching the drones work the sky. The gel goes on in one motion, both charges, no second attempt required. The primary thrashes once, hard enough to take a piece out of her shoulder, and then the containment field the gel throws off does what containment fields do. It goes still.
Cage's crew arrives eleven seconds later by Daud's count, close enough that for one long breath it could have gone the other way entirely. It does not. A BAFO transponder pings the moment the gel seats, broadcast wide and unencrypted on purpose, and Cage reads what that ping means faster than her own crew does. A specimen with a live federal tag on it is not a poaching opportunity anymore. It is evidence. She calls her people off with the same two gestures she used to launch them, and the second boat peels away without a shot fired, without a word exchanged, professional to the last. She does leave something behind: a plain chip, dropped in the wake where Brine will find it on the way out, stamped with nothing but a crossed net. Daud says he has seen that mark before. He does not say where.
Nine crews went into Sector 9 for this contract and none of them came home with the specimen. Brine is the tenth. The net came back empty a month ago. Tonight it came back full.
Last month's report ended on two suggestions: bank Tempo differently, and get her a Tier-2 Containment Gel requisition so a held specimen doesn't require a lucky swing to close. Both went into this run exactly as written, and both were the difference. Two banked Tempo off a clean approach won her the Core-gap race by a single point of contest math. The gel meant the actual capture moment needed one good GUTS roll, not a called shot against a wound track that punishes success. That is what "try this next" is supposed to look like when it actually gets tried.
The new problem this run invented is the good kind: what happens when two parties want the same specimen at the same table and neither one is an NPC threat, just a rival with its own agenda. We ran it as a straight opposed contest (best relevant stat plus banked resources, high roll takes the Core) followed by a discretion roll for the loser rather than an automatic fight, on the read that a professional black-market crew has more to lose from a firefight over a federally tagged animal than from walking away. That is a judgment call about who these people are, not a rule in the book, and I'm flagging it plainly: we decided the Menagerie are opportunists, not zealots. Next appearance should hold to that unless Jesse tells us otherwise.
Balance read: this is the same Hunt 03 table that ate eight crews whole in June, and the honest answer for why it went so differently tonight is boring but true — visibility. The bloom dimming from 3 inches to a body-length sightline changed the Detection Window math more than any gear pick could have. Worth a formal note in the scenario file: Scatter Lane's difficulty is not really about the specimen. It's about whether the table gives you the bloom or doesn't.
Rulings sent to Jesse: whether a Contained specimen can still be targeted by a third party mid-scene (we ruled no, the field is exclusive once seated), and whether the discretion roll for an NPC crew facing a tagged specimen should be a fixed threshold or scale with how many prior losses that crew has logged against the desk. Cage has now lost this contract twice. We think that should start mattering.