The Phantom convulsed against atmospheric entry, and Mana held her breath.
Not from necessity. For the silence.
"Thirty seconds to drop," came the pilot's mechanical announcement. His eyes had avoided hers since boarding. They usually did.
Her fingers traced the seals, skimmed the familiar cold edges of her chestplate, lingered on the rabbit's foot at her hip—its fabric worn thin, edges unraveling. Its origin remained a blank space in her memory.
"Twenty seconds."
Beyond the viewport, a dead world rushed to greet her—rust-carved canyons splitting ashen plains like ancient scars. The research beacon waited somewhere in that desolation. Another "simple" job.
The bay doors parted. Air howled through the cabin.
Mana stepped into the void.
Freefall embraced her. Her armor battled the atmosphere, heat crawling along her visor's edge, data streams cascading in her peripheral vision. She'd check them later.
Now, she surrendered to the melody.
Hmm-hmm-hm-hmmmm...
Something flickered at the edge of her awareness—static in the Core, a frequency that didn't belong. She blinked. Gone.
Barely audible beneath reentry's roar. Notes from a forbidden game, honoring a soldier she shouldn't idolize.
"Playing that game again, I see."
Fox connected. The Core at her skull's base warmed, a familiar sensation she'd felt thousands of times before.
She answered with continued humming.
"Mana. Your dopamine signature gives you away. Another campaign marathon?"
"...Just the final missions."
"The last mission is endless."
"He needed help."
"A fictional character?"
She adjusted trajectory as the ground approached. "An efficient one."
Fox laughed in her mind—quiet, quick. Something in her chest loosened at the sound. No matter where they sent her, that was home.
Mana sliced through the stratosphere's burning blue boundary, body parallel to the horizon, arms extended as though to welcome the lifeless planet below. Her helmet filled with the shriek of friction against polymer—not frightening but musical, percussion vibrating through her bones. She hummed along, finding her way to that triumphant theme from her pre-deployment gaming session.
She would have made the Chief proud. The thought was childish. It made her grin.
A glimmer on her HUD, Doppler red, warned of incoming micro-shrapnel. Mana tipped her wrist to adjust her vector, letting the debris peel off her right shoulder pauldron in a plume of white-hot sparks. Suit sensors flickered at the impact but resolved green. She exhaled—a breath measured in increments of barometric pressure and lactic acid saturation, readouts dancing in her periphery.
Above the noise, another presence: a voice, as always.
Fox murmured into her neural link. "I worry when you get nostalgic during drops. It correlates with a 12% increase in unnecessary risk-taking."
"Am I?" She toggled her external feed, letting the old hymn spiral out into the comms void. "You know, it's tradition."
"I prefer you with a full complement of limbs," Fox said, his voice a warm current against the static. "Twelve seconds to touchdown. The extraction teams hate your humming."
"They're not here."
"Fair enough. Sing if you want."
She fell silent instead. The approaching surface commanded her focus—jagged rock formations, patches of withered flora, a desiccated riverbed carving through the rust-colored landscape. Her suit's thrusters pulsed in precise intervals, shedding speed. She collided with the ground, disappearing momentarily in a crimson cloud.
Firm. Precise. Impact energy rippled upward through her enhanced frame, dissolving before it reached her thoracic vertebrae.
"Biometrics green. Textbook arrival."
"As expected."
"Uploading beacon waypoint. Two kilometers of absolutely nothing scenic ahead. I'll talk you through it."
Mana was already in motion.
She felt the world tug at her bones, the planet's gravity like an old friend with rough hands. The surface below resolved into the jagged veins of a tectonic wasteland, red ochre and black basalt, as lifeless as a skull. She tuned the optical layer up, enhancing the dust storms that crawled along the horizon like a million pale insects. For a moment, the sensation of falling ceased to be violent; she was weightless.
Fox connected. Familiar. Safe. She flexed, arcing her body, actuators along her spine rippling in response. The suit's microjets popped, decelerating her so sharply the world swam. Mana pointed her toes, aligning for a feet-first landing, her breath slow and steady as she cut through the haze and dust like a spear.
There was a window, a microsecond of total silence before impact. She filled it with the memory of a controller's touch, a laugh shared over synaptic bandwidth, a dozen tiny anchors to the world she protected. Then the ground met her boots—shock absorbers engaged, ankles flexing perfectly—and the entire planet seemed to hold its breath.
She stood, knees bent in the dust, head bowed. She waited for the blue-white haze of her afterimage to dissipate, and then straightened, flexing her fingers. No damage. No pain. Only the familiar tingle of accomplishment and the low hum of Fox's pride on the shared channel.
"Offer's still open," Mana replied, dusting imaginary grit off her greaves. "Though the playlist might need work."
The horizon here was jagged with spires of glassy rock, fractured by the collapse of ancient superstructures. Winds crawled along the plains, sculpting everything in sight into the likeness of abandoned cities and broken bridges, ghosts of a civilization that had never even existed. It suited her. Mana liked places where the landscape was as blank as her deployment records.
Fox piped back in. "Achtung, Einsatzbereit."
Mana's fingers twitched with pleasure at the familiar syllables. "Verstanden, Kontrolle aktiv," she replied, the German flowing easily between them—a language from Earth's history that few still spoke, preserved only in old archives and military databases.
"Your pronunciation is improving," Fox noted. "The consonant was perfect."
"We should use more compound nouns next time," she said, arranging small rocks in a perfect line while she spoke. "Zusammengesetzte Substantive. The structures feel... satisfying."
Mana grinned.
The world could be ending, and Fox would still be there, a constant in her ear and behind her eyes, ready to laugh at her jokes and drag her back from the brink.
She sighted the relay—a pale scar of metal in the rubble, half-buried and haloed in shifting dust. Mana jogged toward it, her movements economical but graceful, a choreography written by hundreds of identical missions and the one irreplaceable person who cared if she survived. She withdrew the beacon—a dull silver spike, unremarkable but heavier than it looked—and knelt at the device's base.
Fox was quiet, but she could feel him: the faint pulse of his attention, the way his focus narrowed whenever she was at work. It was almost embarrassing, this level of care. If she were anyone else, it might have been romantic. Instead, it just felt safe.
She set the beacon with practiced hands, the magnetic lock biting home with a satisfying click. A green light blinked in her HUD. Task one, complete.
Fox broke the silence. "Your neurochemistry spiked during that drop. Endorphins, adrenaline, dopamine—the works."
Mana flapped her hands twice at her sides, a quick, precise motion, and rocked forward slightly on the balls of her feet. Her eyes crinkled at the corners, though her mouth remained a neutral line.
"I've monitored hundreds of drops. Most operatives just experience fear." Fox said.
"Liar," she said, smiling at the rock. "You absolutely did. All of you do. You just forget to log it."
A moment passed. Wind howled and battered her armor, but the comm link was clear.
"Maybe," Fox admitted. "But none of them hum like you do."
Mana straightened, brushing her fingers against the cold relay as if it were a living thing.
"Beacon set," she said. "What's next?"
Fox's tone switched, instantly all business. "Perimeter scan shows movement at the southern ridge. Get that beacon secured and prepare for extraction. We're not alone out here."
Mana nodded, feeling the weight settle over her. It was always like this: one moment she was a child, the next a weapon. The shift never stopped being dizzying, even after years of training and missions and the endless war.
She watched the horizon, dust spirals in the distance, waiting for the next command. In her ear, the voice of Fox—her controller, her anchor—remained, warm and steady. And somewhere, underneath the static of battle and the endless noise of survival, she kept humming.
The wind swept through the ruins around Mana's position. She squatted on her haunches, fingers splayed over the relay's battered casing, and let herself drift in the hum of silence between orders. If she closed her eyes, she could almost hear Fox's heartbeat—a phantom echo threaded through her own.
The silence shattered.
Fox snapped, urgency overriding his usual composure. "Mana, four contacts approaching from the south ridge. Jäger-class. They're moving in formation—this isn't a patrol, it's a hunt."
Mana didn't wait for the rest. Instinct folded her into a tight crouch, hand on the hilt at her hip. Her HUD flickered, resolving the contacts: four bright motes in the pale dust, fanned out in a hunter's crescent.
Jäger.
She felt her pulse quicken, the thrill lancing through her from the base of her skull to her fingertips. The Jäger were not animals, not even soldiers in the old human sense. They moved as if coordinated by a mind that did not sleep, each step a data point in an unfolding algorithm of pursuit and kill.
Mana watched as the lead Jäger halted at a spire of pitted basalt, head canting to the side. The others circled, keeping a calculated distance, claws flexing in the wind. They stood nearly three meters tall, armored in plates of deep crimson grown from their own skin. Humanoid, but wrong—too massive, too still. Their helms had no visible eyes, only sensor clusters that tracked her every breath—and Mana found herself almost admiring the design.
Fox said, "Mana, don't engage them yet," but his voice wavered with uncertainty. "Something's different about these. Their movement patterns are... deliberate. Almost ritualistic."
The leader shot upward, scaling the spire's vertical face with spider-like precision. Mana's fingers found the hilt at her hip before conscious thought, releasing it from its lock with a practiced flick. Her thumb pressed the activation stud.
Blue-white plasma erupted from the hilt, forming the katana's deadly edge with a hungry roar. She carved an arc through the air, the blade's afterimage burning against her vision like lightning. The Jäger dropped to the ground three meters away, its armored limbs splayed in attack position. Yet it hesitated, the dark visor of its helm capturing and fracturing the weapon's glow.
"Hold back if possible," Fox said, his voice steadier now. "These aren't typical Jäger. The way they're observing, coordinating—it's like they're sharing tactical data in real time."
Mana shifted her weight, shoulders loosening as she settled into a defensive stance. "Come on," she murmured, addressing neither Fox nor herself, but the creature that studied her with cold calculation and ancient malevolence.
It accepted her invitation. The Jäger lunged, leading with its serrated claws, but Mana had already slipped inside its attack radius. Her katana flashed upward in a two-handed strike, slicing through the junction between torso and neck. The plasma edge dissolved ceramic plating and the organic matter beneath. The creature froze in its bisected state for one perfect moment before collapsing backward, iridescent fluid pooling beneath it.
The remaining three showed no reaction to their comrade's death. They simply adjusted their formation, recalculating their approach, and advanced as one.
Mana let herself move—danced, if she were honest. Every pivot, every extension of her limbs was governed by muscle memory and the real-time overlays Fox streamed into her cortex. The HUD showed not only the Jäger's positions, but the most likely attack vectors, color-coded for threat. Fox spoke to her in a rapid-fire staccato, too quick for words, just impulse and caution and go go go.
One Jäger dove low, aiming to cripple her at the knees; the other flanked wide right, looking for a blind spot. Mana went vertical, springing over the first with a gymnast's grace, and slashed downward. The katana hissed through an outstretched limb, severing it at the joint. The wounded Jäger did not slow; it spun and used the detached claw as a projectile, hurling it at Mana's exposed flank.
Fox's voice came through the neural link, calm and measured: "Behind you." She was already turning, letting the claw glance off her pauldron with a metallic screech. The third Jäger had circled behind, its throat emitting a sound like stones grinding together, jaws parting to reveal rows of serrated teeth. "Drop," Fox said, the single word delivered with quiet precision as it lunged for her throat.
She dropped, letting the creature's momentum sail overhead. Fox pulsed a hazard warning. Mana rolled, came up on one knee, and drove the katana point-first into the thing's ventral core. The plasma boiled it from within. For a half-second, she smelled ozone and burned organic plating, and then the thing was just another ruin in the dust.
The last Jäger stood its ground, head bowed, arms twitching with nervous energy. It made no sound, no warning. It simply waited, as if it were unsure of its orders. Mana advanced, blade lowered, watching for any trick.
Fox said quietly, "It's analyzing you." A pause. The comm line crackled with his measured breathing. "Your call." The silence stretched between them, filled only with the soft hum of her neural interface and the distant whistle of wind through the ruins.
The Jäger charged.
Mana anticipated the feint, sidestepped, but the creature did not attack her. It swept past, snatched up the relay beacon, and—before she could even process the move—hurled it as far as it could into the rocks.
Mana watched the relay arc through the air, tracking its trajectory with cold precision. Her face remained impassive, only her eyes narrowing slightly as the device shattered against distant rock. A single exhaled breath, barely audible, was her only acknowledgment.
Fox muttered, "Tactical vandalism. Effective, if petty," but there was a trace of pride in his voice. "I'd have done the same thing."
Mana sheathed the katana. The weapon's plasma edge collapsed with a musical chime, leaving the air smelling faintly of electricity. She squared her shoulders and approached the remaining Jäger, empty hands raised in a mockery of surrender.
The Jäger hesitated. Then, with a suddenness that startled her, it knelt, its throat vibrating with a sound like distant thunder. She could have ended it, but something in the posture—a vulnerability, a gesture of meaning—made her pause.
Fox's whisper, only for her: "It's offering surrender. Or communication. Either way, this isn't in the briefing. Command would want you to terminate, but..." A pause, his voice dropping even lower. "I think it's trying to tell us something. Your call, Chief."
Mana knelt as well, mirroring it. The Jäger cocked its head, watching, and slowly, carefully, set its claws against the ground in a pattern—one, then three, then two, then one. Mana frowned, translating the rhythm.
Mana watched the precise tapping of alien claws against stone, recognizing the rhythmic patterns of Kliktik—the percussive language Fox had briefed her on but she'd never witnessed firsthand. "It's speaking to us," she breathed, "actual Kliktik dialect."
Fox ran a quick translation. "It's saying 'bridge-entity,'" he replied, voice tight with concentration. "And something about... collective recognition? My Kliktik is rusty, but I think it's trying to tell us you're different from other humans they've encountered."
Mana stared at the creature. She reached out, palm open. The Jäger recoiled, but did not attack.
"Fox, if I die doing this, you have permission to say 'I told you so.'"
She touched the armor plating. The surface was cold, ridged with microchannels. The Jäger's visor flickered, then locked on her face. She felt—not through her skin, but deep in the interface at the base of her skull—a wave of static. The world around her blurred; for a moment, she saw through the Jäger's eyes, a vision of herself standing tall and luminous, surrounded by a corona of soft, blue-white fire.
The connection snapped. The Jäger jerked away and collapsed, motionless, at her feet.
Fox let the silence hang. Then, gently: "What did you see when you touched it, Mana? What did it show you about yourself?"
She shook herself, checking for wounds or sabotage. "Fine. They just… wanted to see me. Or maybe show me something."
Fox said, more urgently, "Mana, we've got incoming. Two more signatures—bigger than the others. These are elites. Drop what you're doing and prepare for contact."
The first hit her before she saw it. A wall of impact, not sharp but overwhelming, like being hit by a speeding train made of muscle and rage. Mana tumbled, rolling with the blow, and came up with the katana blazing. The new Jäger was twice the mass of the others, armored in geometric plates that deflected her first strike. The blade sizzled against the shell, sending sparks into the wind.
The second one closed from the other side, flanking perfectly. Mana jumped, twisting midair to avoid claws aimed at her waist, and landed on the back of the first. She stabbed downward, seeking a gap in the armor.
The katana met resistance, then found the seam at the base of the neck. Mana drove it deep, using her full weight, and the beast shuddered and crashed forward. The other elite adapted immediately, grabbing for her legs. Mana kicked free, landing a glancing blow that sent her tumbling over the relay node.
She rolled, came up to one knee, and found herself staring into the flat, mirrored gaze of the elite.
Fox relayed the data in a burst. "Mana, these aren't standard Jäger—they're mimics. They've been studying our weapons, our tactics. The blade it's carrying? That's a perfect copy of your katana's energy signature. They're learning from you with every engagement."
Too late. The elite leveled a blade at her—a perfect twin to her own katana, only red as heart-blood. The energy hum vibrated in her bones. Mana's mind raced: mimics shouldn't be here, not in this sector. These were high-class adversaries, deployed only in contested zones sectors away from this backwater operation. Someone had changed the rules without telling her.
Mana blinked, once, and felt something inside her—fear, maybe, or awe.
"Fox?" she whispered.
The world narrowed until only the standoff remained: Mana, her plasma blade trembling with micro-oscillations, and the mimic-Jäger, which tilted its head in perfect harmony, its own blade pulsing an angry crimson. The light refracted from the scarred basalt and painted the entire scene in war-colors.
The hum inside her skull spiked. Fox, rapid and clinical now, abandoned metaphor. "Weapon core phasing at six megahertz above baseline. The energy signature—they have improved the capacitor cycling. Mana, assume the mimic will counter your standard sequence."
Mana feinted left, but the Jäger didn't bite, didn't even twitch. Its mirrored blade tracked her, angle-for-angle. She clustered her options, ran through them, discarded most. Fox peppered her feed with new overlays—critical joints, likely weaknesses, calculated probabilities of success. None of them broke fifty percent.
"They're using predictive vectors—modeling your previous engagements. Your past behaviors are now an exploit. Suggest rapid divergence from pattern."
"On it," she whispered, but her mouth was dry, tongue stuck to the roof.
The mimic advanced in increments of perfect geometry—three steps, pause, blade raised at an angle calculated to intercept her reach. Mana eased right, holding the katana with reversed grip. She'd never trained for this; she'd have to improvise and hope the lag time in their algorithm gave her just a crack.
Fox kept relaying updates, but they were granular, a data-snowfall she ignored except for the flashes of bold red—danger, predicted loss, imminent termination. If this was a test, she owed them a surprise.
Mana lunged, but instead of the expected strike, she dove low, catching herself on her left hand, flipping into an arcing kick. The mimic adjusted, parried her boot with its own reinforced tibia, redirected the force back into her. The shock rippled up through her armor, rattling her teeth. She spun with it, used the momentum to come up behind, but the mimic's swatted her midsection, slamming her into the dust.
Her HUD howled with amber alerts. She rolled, bracing for the killing blow. It didn't come.
Instead, the mimic crouched, as if studying her. The crystalline panel on its armor plating fluttered, then split to reveal a cluster of shimmering filaments—neural receivers, maybe, or organs for communication.
Fox's voice tightened with concentration. "I'm picking up a signal—complex waveform, nothing like standard Jäger protocols. It's broadcasting on at least sixteen channels simultaneously, but the signature..." A pause, the sound of his breath catching. "This isn't in our database. Whatever's watching through that thing, it's not just the hive we know."
The mimic shifted, recalibrating, sensor arrays flicking as it drank her in with those the dark visor. In her mind, Fox's voice beat urgent and cold: "Mana. Kill it. Now." No reason, no context, just that hard flatness she'd never heard from him before.
She stumbled upright, core burning, the katana still humming low in her grip. The space between her and the mimic stretched—one long, deliberate inhale. It waited for her.
But something else moved in her vision: the relay node, still blinking weakly. The second elite had circled, probably to cut off her exit, and was now moving in a low-bound sprint for the horizon, relay clamped in a vice. Not a weapon. The message.
Fox's voice sharpened. "Mana." Just her name. She went.
The mimic advanced, carving scarlet lines through the dust with every step, but Mana ducked under the swing of its twin blades. She felt the heat of plasma burn past her jaw, close enough to fuse the air. Instinct yanked her left, following the relay like a north star, while the mimic slashed through empty space behind her. She rolled, momentum carrying her up and over a basalt outcrop, then sprinted.
Pulse shrieking in her ears. The other elite had a full ten-meter lead, relay tucked like a precious egg—must have snatched it when the first one fell. No way to catch up—not with her leg half-numb from where the mimic's blade had grazed her, and the second Jäger closing in tight behind, its footfalls sending tremors through the basalt.
Fox said, "You have a shot. Take it."
Mana dropped to one knee, braced against a cratered ridge, both hands clamped on the katana's hilt. She switched modes—edge to lance—fine-tuned the core. She tasted copper, heat, and something sharp at the back of her throat. She'd never risked this shot outside the sim: trainers always screamed at her for abusing the high-voltage modes.
The elite vanished into a dust vortex, six heartbeats from escape.
Mana locked her limbs, found the relay's outline through the haze—and threw.
The katana tore free with a hollow scream of blue-white light, splitting the air. She didn't breathe. For a fraction of a second there was only that arc of brilliance, the ghost of Fox's steadying hand in the dead-world range, and the certainty that what left her would not return.
The blade struck the relay dead center, passed through the elite's midsection, bisecting the armor with a pop of ozone and a spray of luminous ichor. Time stretched: the mimic froze, the relay spun, even the sound seemed to stall. Then the elite toppled, the relay clattering out as the katana buried half its length into the obsidian wall behind.
Fox exhaled sharply in her link. "You missed the primary by three centimeters. But it'll do."
Mana straightened and limped toward the wreckage. She wrenched her katana from the obsidian, the blade flickering back to life. The relay blinked, battered but alive; she scooped it up, still hot to the touch.
A second elite emerged at the ridge's far edge, already in retreat. Its silhouette shrank against the horizon with each bounding stride. Mana subvocalized her command.
"Fox, range."
Fox's voice streamed data like a targeting computer: "Distance: 1,243.7 meters and accelerating. Wind: 5.2 m/s from 315°. Target velocity: 48 km/h and climbing—49—51—it's hitting sprint mode. Ambient temp: -14 °C. Barometric pressure: 98.7 kPa. Recalculating... Distance now 1,267 meters. Target lead: 0.74 degrees right. Compensate minus 0.03 for Coriolis. You have a three-second window before it breaks line of sight."
Mana's Nexus pistols hovered in her vision. She exhaled, calibrated the micro-adjusters at her hips, and drew them in one fluid motion so blindingly fast it felt telepathic.
She squeezed the triggers. The world narrowed to two pinpoint flares of violet-gold. The rounds punched through the swirling dust, arcing perfectly over the crater rim. At 1.24 kilometers they struck together—one in the chest cavity, the other through the neck joint—vaporizing the elite's neural cluster in a shimmer of energy. Its head snapped back, visor fracturing in a blossom of sparks, then it crumpled without a sound.
Fox's voice came low, edged with…question? "Nice shot. Relay is secure. Extraction in two minutes."
Mana dropped to one knee, breathing hard, the copper tang thick on her tongue and she turned to the last survivor.
It stood just beyond the flare of her muzzle flash, blade folded at its side. It did not charge; a low rumble escaped its throat, almost…hesitant. Mana's grip tightened.
The Jäger made a simple gesture—two claws together, then pointed at its fallen kin, then at her. Slow. Deliberate.
Fox went silent.
The elite crouched by the first body and, with an alien gentleness, drew a looping glyph in the dust: two circles intertwined, pulsing faintly under the UV glow of her HUD. Mana's breath caught. Twin circles, one inside the other, connected by three precise lines that pulsed with faint bioluminescence. The exact configuration from Lab 7's sealed files—the symbol that jolted her awake at 0300 hours, sheets soaked with sweat, the word "Eden" frozen on her lips.
Mana watched, heart hammering. The creature she'd trained to kill was painting a memorial.
She lowered her pistol, dust erasing footprints, the relay beacon cold in her palm. The Jäger remained kneeling by its sigil, head bowed,a sound like metal cooling after fire escaped its throat.
"Fox," she whispered. "What is it doing?"
"Kill it." Fox's voice cut through static. "Now."
Mana raised her pistol. The alien's sensor clusters reflected the weapon's muzzle. It didn't flinch. Didn't run.
Her finger tightened on the trigger. The shot echoed across the barren landscape—clean, through the neural cluster. The elite collapsed beside its own memorial, limbs folding neatly like a paper doll.
Fox went silent, then: "Extraction ETA ninety seconds."
Mana pressed the relay to the ground, green light blinking alive beneath her fingers. Her free hand found the seam of her chestplate—three traces right, three traces left, the rhythm as familiar as breathing. The wind howled, dust swirling around her boots.