Meet Rai Kiranov, a cyborg security contractor for Atsani Risk Control.

Rai, a veteran of the Arpallian Navy, had thought she'd seen the last of security work. When she was in the service, she had slugged six years in the naval MPs until she'd had quite enough of wrangling drunk sailors into the brig, and she had capped off the last four years in a vehicle maintenance role instead. The lateral into a new service post wasn't difficult, provided a candidate had the aptitude and the drive. Rai did. She gleefully finished out her run with the Navy as a warrant officer, proudly managing a team, reloading spacefaring gunships and buffing out the dents.

When her time was up, Rai was more than happy to apply her spacecraft repair skills for a fatter paycheck than the Navy would ever give her, and a friend at Atsani Risk Control referred her. ARC, a protection agency specializing in protecting ships from pirates, snapped her up as quick as they could, probably endeared with her diverse skillset. Unfortunately, Rai realized a little too late that spaceborne escort wasn't all Atsani did, and that she should have read her contract a little more carefully before she signed it. Shore leave, at least in this gig, wasn't always just shore leave. Sometimes, you earned your keep on solid ground.

Rai had known some trivia, some factoid from deep in her childhood memory, that the Empire had always needed extra coverage for the less lawful zones of the capitol, since imperial police had never quite been able to wrangle it on their own. That meant contracting mercs to work civil residential zones the police wouldn't dare go into. As a valuable technician with top-of-the-line, military-grade technician's cybernetics, never in a million years did Rai think she'd be one of the poor mooks whose card got pulled for this job. According to the full-timers on the street gig, almost everyone with MP experience got this shit-end hidden away in the final version of their signing papers, unless they somehow caught it and raised a fuss. Must've been quite a lucrative government contract for Atsani, to piss off their technical workers like that.

Sure, it wouldn't last long for Rai. Her current contract only required 120 hours of boots-on-the-ground a year. Just two weeks, at 60 hours apiece, and she would be done, but she was damn well sure she'd renegotiate this part out of her next contract. At least the full-timers she worked with were supportive and understanding, and the overtime-plus-hazard pay was going to look great in her next paycheck. But as far as perks go, that's where it ended. Hearing gunshots, Rai frowned, growling through flared nostrils. She dropped her datalink visor down over her eyes, readied her sidearm, and checked in with the boys.

Time to get to work.