Sammy Castaneda

Session 01 — Operation Living Bomb

Sammy arrived at Las Vegas Airport and introduced himself as “the Savage.” He sized up Ronnie Vint and Guy LeFleur the way he sized up everything — quickly, quietly, with an eye toward where the threat would come from. Sam Elliott drove the three of them to the Voss Campus in a corporate limousine. Somewhere on the ride, Ronnie produced a deck of cards and started a poker game. Sammy played straight. Ronnie did not. When Ronnie lost anyway, his Bad Temper fired and he accused Sammy of cheating, knocked the cards off the table. Sammy had done nothing. He watched the outburst the way a man watches weather — something that happens, not something that concerns him.

At the Voss Campus, Adrian Voss and Major Jenkins laid out the brief. The target was The Exploding Man — a young man who detonated in crowds, survived, and repeated. Capture alive. Cave complex in the Afghan mountains. The team inserted by night parachute into the mountains five klicks from the target. When the team reached the cave, Sammy slipped forward alone into the darkness. Two sentries at the cave entrance. He killed both with his knife — quick, efficient work, Stealth 13 carrying him close enough for Knife 14 to finish it. Silent. Clean. The kind of thing he was built for. Inside the cave, gas grenades dropped three guards but the target was immune. Major Jenkins deployed the Sonic Weapon and put the target down hard. During exfiltration by helicopter, four insurgents on flying carpets intercepted the aircraft. The team engaged from the air and cleared them. Dawn debrief at a NATO base. One hundred and fifty thousand dollars per operator. Major Jenkins announced that combat suits were waiting back at the campus.

Before the team left the base, Sammy noticed something. Dr. Jones, the flight physician, had white powder dusted across his workstation. Cocaine. Ronnie noticed it too. Neither of them said a word.

Session 02 — Terra-ble First Impressions

At the Voss Campus, Sammy spotted Brittany — a woman on the base who moved wrong. Too fast. His Lecherousness did the rest of the thinking. They ran the Obstacle Course together — log walks, wall climbs, wire crawls, cargo nets. Brittany led through most of it and finished first with a smile and a wink. Sammy was supposed to be at R&D. He was late.

Down on R&D Level -1, four suits hung on the wall. One was noticeably smaller than the others. Scientists adjusted the helmet to compensate for fit issues — Dwarfism makes standard equipment a negotiation. Voss greeted his late arrival with pointed politeness. Ronnie kicked Sammy’s unoccupied suit across the floor; Sammy caught it by the foot just before it got away. He brought up the targeting system, painted a scientist standing across the room with it — casual menace, the reticle settling on the man’s chest while Sammy’s expression stayed flat. The Invisibility Surface installed successfully — TL10 optics that rendered the suit effectively invisible to the naked eye. Sammy also requested Rocket Boots, a retractable blade, and an Electromagnetic Hand Upgrade. All pending. A second suit race against Brittany followed. She was faster through most of the course, but Sammy used enhanced jumping to close the gap on the cargo net. They reached the top of the rope at the same time. She hit the bell with her palm. Ding.

The team went through The Portal into Terra. Sammy activated his invisibility and crawled into a three-foot hole in a hillside. The tunnel angled down thirty yards into a dome-shaped underground chamber. In the centre: a Terran Insectoid — a chitinous creature the size of a small car, gnawing on a human femur. Sammy scanned it, fed the data back to the team. They retreated rather than engage. Further out, they recovered torn, bloodstained fatigues bearing the name Hernandez — what was left of the previous recon team. The team pushed north to a ruined alien city — destroyed by conventional weapons roughly a century ago. A statue stood at the centre: three arms, three legs, three eyes. From a high vantage point, they watched two to three hundred insectoid creatures digging across the northern plain.

That evening, Sammy struck up conversation with three nurses at dinner. One, Mary Jane, stayed late and gave him her number. That night, Brittany knocked on his door. Said she was jealous about the nurse. Sammy let her in. She clapped once — two of her. Clapped again — four. Four identical women in his room, same smile. Sammy said nothing for a long moment. Then he stopped asking questions. Brittany was gone before morning. His Weirdness Magnet draws the impossible to him. His Lecherousness ensures he never turns it away.

Session 3 — What Happens in Vegas

Sammy met Beth at the club on the first night and she stayed. Not clingily — she was clear-eyed and easy company, the kind of person who adapts to a room without performing the adaptation. She accompanied him through the rest of Las Vegas: the Strip, the restaurants, the casino floor. Gordon Ramsay’s residency produced the expected friction — the host seated Sammy at a corner table, brought a children’s menu, and produced a booster seat with the confidence of a man making a professional judgment. Sammy looked at the menu, looked at the booster seat, looked at the host, and said nothing. His composure held, as it always holds. He ordered from the adult menu by pointing at it, declined the booster seat by not touching it, and ate a very good meal. He has been underestimated in worse rooms than this.

The hotel corridor incident required fast, clean thinking. Sammy and Jens came back to the wing to find the cleaning cart parked outside a half-open door and a sound from inside that resolved, on approach, into something feeding. A Terran Insectoid — the same species Sammy had catalogued in the underground chamber on Terra — was crouched over the cleaning lady. The creature had come through from the other side, through a portal Jens had failed to seal properly. Jens drew his silenced pistol and put the creature down with measured shots to the head. Sammy handled what came after — intercepting hotel security with the calm demeanour of a man reporting a minor maintenance issue, deflecting their questions while Beth stood visible in the background. It was enough to buy the time needed. He filed the incident away under operational consequence of Jens’s portal work and continued with the evening.

Beth exchanged contact information with him at the airport on the final morning. She wrote her number on the inside cover of a paperback she pressed into his hands — efficient, understated, no ceremony. Sammy put it in his jacket. The details of the hotel incident he would not be sharing with her. Some gaps in the story are not omissions so much as practicalities, and Beth struck him as a woman who had enough sense not to ask about the ones that mattered.

Session 04 — Fallen Stars

Sammy configured the limpet mines before departure — eight tear gas, four concussion — and ran a systems check on the invisibility surface. In Iceland, his read on the fragment site was correct: he reached his jump arc at the right moment, suit-assisted, and was closing on it cleanly when Ronnie caught him by the arm mid-air and threw him clear. He landed the way he lands everything, which is without wasted motion, and confirmed the suit had registered no damage. The loss he filed without comment. Ronnie wanted it more. That is a category of information Sammy keeps.

Russia was a different order of problem. The bear had already died once by the time it stopped being dead, and Sammy had watched Ronnie’s blade work on the way in and made his own assessment of the timeline. He activated the invisibility surface — fifty percent power draw, a cost he accepted — and moved to thirty yards with the device: two Claymore charges and two pounds of C4, fourteen pounds total in a canvas sleeve. He threw it into the chest cavity. He detonated it at the right moment. The blast tore through the creature and Sammy walked into the smoke, drew his retractable blade, and drove it through the bear’s eye into the brain stem. The creature still moved afterward. Sammy accepted that information, fell back, and used the Gyrock to stagger it for Ronnie’s finish. Combat is a series of handoffs. He does not need the kill.

The fragment recovery sweep produced no contact incidents beyond Russia, and Sammy completed his site-handling procedures without variation. His Danger Sense had been elevated throughout the Russian site — a background hum he has learned to trust as data rather than noise — and it did not fully quiet until they were wheels-up out of the country. Back at base, he noted Ronnie’s incident in the mess hall from across the room: the cafeteria worker going down, Ronnie’s expression doing something that was not quite what Ronnie’s expression usually does. Sammy catalogued it the same way he catalogued Brittany duplicating herself in a hotel room in Las Vegas — as a fact about the world he now operates in, a fact that does not benefit from being said aloud. He has not commented on Ronnie’s new capacity to anyone. He is waiting to understand what he is looking at before he decides what to do with the observation. Patience, in Sammy’s experience, is the difference between intelligence and noise.

Session 05 — Deep Sea Fragments and Desert Swarms

Brittany was in the briefing room. Bald now — shaved her head for the helmet, which meant she was suited, which meant she was operational, which meant this was not the private thing it had been in her quarters on the base. She clapped once and became eight of herself, all of them looking at Sammy with an intensity that occupied the exact space between flirtation and threat. “Am I the only one?” she asked, or they asked, or the question was asked by a collective that Sammy still does not have a framework for evaluating. He answered honestly. He counted eight. That was what he could verify. Seven vanished and the one that remained smiled at him with something he could not classify, and then the briefing continued as though the room had not just contained a problem he is going to have to solve eventually.

The sub turret was a known quantity. Sammy seated himself at the beam controls and applied what he applies: patience, precision, timing. The first Chinese submarine presented a clean target profile after Ronnie’s evasive maneuver cleared the torpedo. Sammy put a shot through the enemy’s top gun, then walked subsequent rounds down the hull until the structural integrity gave way and the ocean finished the job. Over one hundred points of damage on the killing blow. He catalogued the implosion as data about beam weapon penetration at depth and moved to the next target. At the third site, the anglerfish was the immediate threat — vast, bioluminescent, and closing on their vessel after biting a Chinese sub in half. Sammy lined the shot and put it through the creature’s eye. The creature screamed — a sound that carried through the water and the hull — and veered off into the dark. Jens had been staring at the thing’s light for the entire engagement, completely incapacitated. Sammy filed that as a vulnerability in a teammate, the same way he files all vulnerabilities: without judgement, but permanently.

Las Vegas offered the same things it always offers. Sammy gambled modestly and drank milk from a sippy cup in a booster seat because the bit committed to is the bit that pays off. At Medieval Times, the evening proceeded with rotisserie chicken and jousting and the particular energy of men spending money they earned by destroying submarines. Then the phones buzzed and the screaming started outside and Sammy’s world contracted to the thing it contracts to when the noise cuts away: target identification, weapon selection, fire.

The parking lot was full of insects — the same things from Terra, nine feet tall, chitin-armoured, fast. Sammy pulled the Gyrock and fired into a cluster of five that were attacking three civilians. The rocket hit cleanly. The insects died. The civilians also died. Sammy noted this. He fired a second rocket into the survivors. Brittany was there — copies of her, plural, firing into the swarm and screaming his name with a register that was not tactical, was not professional, was something personal and furious and unresolved. She had followed him to Vegas. She was in the fight. She was screaming at him between trigger pulls. Sammy does not have the bandwidth for that conversation right now. He has two rockets left and the swarm has not stopped coming and the three dead civilians are in his peripheral vision like a fact he will have to look at eventually. But not now. Now there is only the next shot and the creature it needs to go through.