Europa – Quarantine Zone Core
Ghost Team – Infiltration Log // Nanosuit Feed [Encrypted]
Operatives: Ghost-Actual (Raine), Ghost-Two (Ashir), Ghost-Three (Nova), Ghost-Four (Kryze)
Objective: Investigate anomaly signal at Site Theta-Vault Echo.
Status: Infiltrated. No contact. Vault systems dormant. Proceeding to core node.
They moved like shadows beneath Europa's crust—barely more than whispers of heat in a frozen tomb. The nanosuits compensated for the pressure, temperature, electromagnetic interference. What little light there was came from suit-mounted HUDs and bioscanners flickering blue and green across obsidian ice.
The Vault didn't feel dead. It felt… waiting.
"Picking up residual field currents," Nova whispered through the neural link. "Not ONI. This is Ceph-coded. Active at subharmonic levels."
"Define active," Kryze murmured.
Ashir's voice cut in, clipped and sharp. "Like a heart beating after death."
Ahead of them, the ancient structure revealed itself—black, twisted spires of unknown alloy fused into ice and stone. Ceph architecture—part machine, part geometry, part something else entirely.
And it was humming.
"This place is older than memory," Raine thought quietly. "It's not just Ceph—it's Ceph before language. This is a shrine."
They descended into the lowest node chamber. Pillars spiraled toward the ceiling like roots grown in reverse, each etched with burning fractal patterns.
And in the center: the source.
It pulsed from a crystalline structure encased in ice—twisting and unfolding like petals. ONI hadn't touched it. Too deep. Too unstable.
But Ghost Team? They weren't here to steal.
They were here to understand.
Nova reached forward, deploying a floating VI probe wrapped in shielding fields.
"I'm inside the waveform. It's reactive—not random. This is a message."
"To who?" Ashir asked.
Nova didn't respond right away.
Then: "Us."
The signal stopped.
Suddenly. Cleanly. As if… acknowledging them.
All four suits instantly bristled with alert tones.
"Movement!" Kryze snapped. "Not us—NOT Ceph."
Shadows peeled themselves from the far walls. Black armor. Human shapes.
"ONI," Raine growled. "It was a beacon. We're in their snare."
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ONI Tactical Feed – Overwatch Drone Zeta-9
Ghost Team has made contact with core structure. Extraction window in two minutes. Drone intercept teams holding pattern. Primary capture protocol initiating.
Ghost Team broke off into formation instantly—Raine covering the signal source, Nova encrypting and dumping data into a secure burst cache, Ashir already deploying a localized pulse jamming field.
Kryze lobbed a sonic decoy toward the tunnel behind them.
"You think they'll just let us walk out?" he muttered.
"They want the suits. Not us," Raine said. "So let's not give them either."
The team turned to exfil—but ONI had already collapsed half the tunnels. Drones. Automated sentry crawlers. Directional EMP bursts to weaken their suits.
Ashir was hit first—EMP spike that fried the suit's neurolink interface. He dropped, twitching, but alive.
Nova dragged him into cover, only to be separated from Kryze by a collapsing ice wall.
And through it all, the signal resumed again—subtle this time, layered beneath the chaos. The Vault… was listening.
Raine planted a failsafe charge at the core.
"If we can't take it," she said coldly, "they can't either."
"Exfil is compromised," Nova said. "We're going hot."
"Confirm," Raine said. "Ghost Team—Phase Black."
That meant one thing.
No surrender.
No capture.
No return.
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Europa – Vault Echo Perimeter
ONI Black Division – Operation Lockjaw
Field Command: Director Halbek (Remote Oversight)
"We have them. Three suits inside the node chamber. Fourth presumed disabled. Proceed with non-lethal intercept."
A half-dozen black-clad operatives, faces masked behind reactive optics and hardshell armor, ghosted through the frostbitten corridors. These weren't standard ODSTs. They were Collectors—ONI's capture and extraction specialists. Trained to move in silence, strike in waves, and leave no bodies.
Behind them came the Catch Teams—equipped with harnessed suppression fields, neural disrupters, and stasis restraints designed specifically for Enclave nanosuits. Designed for this.
Inside the Vault, Ghost Team was falling back fast, splitting up into micro-cell patterns—dispersal meant to throw off sensor tracking. It wasn't working. ONI had mapped the vault weeks in advance, knew every tunnel, every potential escape vector.
Nova tried rerouting her suit's power cells to cook her own tracking beacon. Too slow. A suppression bolt hit her in the spine—her body locking instantly as the suit entered paralysis mode. ONI's tech had improved.
Kryze got further. He looped up through a vertical ice shaft, laid three smart mines, and backtracked—but the Collectors moved around them, not through.
He turned to fight—and three drones hit him with sync'd pulse charges. His suit folded inward, locking his limbs. Before he could trigger his failsafe…
"Stasis lock confirmed. Operator captured. Ghost-Three and Four in custody."
ONI medics moved in, stabilizing Nova's vitals. Kryze was already being sealed into a cryo-stasis pod—alive, not aware.
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Inside the Vault Core
Raine stood alone beneath the crystalline spire. The pulsing signal danced in her HUD like a heartbeat, refusing to be silenced. She'd activated the failsafe charge—but hadn't armed it.
Instead, she triggered her own kill-switch.
"They won't get the suit," she whispered. "But they won't forget us either."
As the ONI breach team closed in on the chamber, they found the operator already slumped. No struggle. No defiance. Helmet removed. Suit core cracked from the inside.
Self-termination complete.
One suit lost. Two captured. One missing—Ashir's body unaccounted for, presumed dead in the collapsed tunnel.
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ONI Tactical Review – 48 Hours Later
Director Halbek, Internal Debriefing:
"We retrieved two full suits. Both operatives in stasis. Raine self-terminated before recovery. The fourth suit is damaged beyond function. Mission Lockjaw is a partial success."
She stood over the armored containment crates as they were lowered into Sublevel Black.
"They died like fanatics," one analyst muttered.
Halbek didn't answer at first. Her eyes scanned the data feeds from the Vault.
"Fanatics… with technology we've barely begun to understand," she said quietly. "We have the hardware now. Let's see if we can… learn anything from the pilots."
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Location: ONI Sublevel Black – Site A-19 (Classified)
Project Designation: THRESHER
The room was sterile. Silent. A cathedral of hidden intentions. Floodlights cast long, stark shadows across the smooth, obsidian-black walls. The only sound came from the occasional ping of biometric monitors and the distant hiss of containment pressure valves.
Two cryo-coffins stood upright, each holding a suspended operative—Ghost-Three and Ghost-Four, now labeled Specimen Alpha and Specimen Beta.
Their suits shimmered faintly under the lights, reactive surfaces still attempting to mask themselves against a background that never changed. Neural activity was minimal—ONI's suppressors had done their job. No dreams. No escape.
Dr. Halvorsen, head of the THRESHER team, stood behind reinforced blast-glass, flanked by neural forensics and material science experts. She tapped her pen against the glass once, twice.
"We've never had one intact before," she murmured. "Don't break it."
The first phase used laser tomography—mapping the outer layer of the nanosuits atom by atom. The suit reacted immediately, tightening against the flesh beneath, hardening into an armored shell. They had to recalibrate five times before the scan stabilized.
Then came microwaves, chemical resonance fields, focused EM bursts—each test met with silence or flickering resistance.
Nothing got in. Nothing got out.
Until the surgical drills were deployed.
Monomolecular boring arms moved in on Specimen Alpha's left arm—drilling so slowly that friction barely existed. Then a spark.
The suit bled.
Not blood—black gel, thick as ink and flecked with shimmering nanite motes. It hissed and melted the edge of the drill. Corrosive, self-repairing, aggressively defensive.
"Hostile nanite ecosystem," muttered one tech. "Not dormant. Not localized. It's everywhere."
So they isolated the arm. Froze it with cryo-clamps, cut it off, and sealed it in a triple-shielded containment pod. Even separated, the arm kept moving. Twitching in containment. The suit attempted to regrow the missing limb before giving up.
The subject didn't react. Still frozen in neural stasis.
The real prize was the suit's spinal core—where they suspected neural-mesh interfaces and data storage resided. ONI wasn't interested in killing these operators.
They wanted what they knew.
A second team moved in, using new high-frequency molecular separators—tools originally meant to crack alloy. After three days of incremental progress, they reached the spinal node.
The moment they penetrated it—
The suit screamed.
Not the person—the suit. It let out a modulated burst of sound that shattered every screen in the lab and blew out three drones.
The suit went live again—despite the operator being brain-suppressed. It tried to reboot. Tried to move. Restraints held. Barely.
Then came the failsafe.
A cascade of nanite decay swept through the entire suit, eating itself from the inside. The arm in containment boiled. The spinal core shorted. The body began to convulse.
THRESHER lab emergency lockdown initiated.
When it was over, all that remained of Specimen Alpha was a liquified shell of nanogel and a neural-inert corpse.
Specimen Beta remained untouched. For now.Dr. Halvorsen stared at the wreckage and muttered, "The suit wasn't protecting the wearer. It was the wearer protecting the suit."They had one more chance.
And this time, ONI wouldn't play carefully.
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Location: ONI Sublevel Black – Site A-19
Subject: Specimen Beta (Ghost-Four)
Operation: THRESHER - Phase II
They'd learned from the last attempt.
No drills. No brute force. No brute anything.
This time, ONI approached with surgical precision, coordinated AI oversight, and a whole new suite of anti-intrusion resonance fields reverse-engineered from the first suit's defensive reactions.
"We treat it like a nervous system, not armor," Halvorsen had told the team.
"We make the suit think the host is already dead."
The procedure took place in a magnetic levitation field, inside a Faraday-caged lab nested within five meters of tritanium shielding. Every inch of the room was sterilized and sealed. Not even the air molecules were trusted.
Three technicians moved as one, choreographed with machine precision under AI guidance.
They began by mapping the biometric pulses that the suit synced with. The nanosuit didn't just rest on the operator—it infused with them. Blood. Neural activity. Lymphatic response. It was an artificial symbiote.
So, they tricked it.
ONI's neural suppressors, now upgraded, induced a state of pseudo-death—no heartbeat, no brain activity, no nerve firings. The operator wasn't killed, merely placed in a suspended animation so deep even the nanosuit's protocols believed he was gone.
It worked.
Slowly, delicately, the nanofiber exoshell began to relax.
The reactive lattice on the torso lost tension.
The limb plating slackened.
The nanosuit began to retract.
Specimen Beta was removed from the Nanosuit.
The man beneath was emaciated, pale, mid-30s. Eyes fluttered in his skull like he was caught in a dream he couldn't escape. Across his spine and sternum were ports, veins of metallic threading woven under the skin, barely human anymore.
They sealed him in cryo for later interrogation—once he could survive waking up.
But the suit?
That was the real prize.
ONI suspended it in a stasis chamber and began non-reactive dissection.
No self-destruct. No resistance. Asleep.
Now, ONI had:
-A fully intact Nanosuit prototype
-Neural data-mapping portsTraces of Ceph-origin nanotech
And possibly…
A map of the Enclave's suit architecture."Reverse-engineering starts now," said Dr. Halvorsen.
"We'll make it ours in five years. Maybe three."