Mana blinked against the retinal afterimage of the desert, her helmet's lenses still etched with the spectral blue of plasma fire and the brilliant violence of the hunt. Now, in the clean white box of the UG interrogation suite, that color felt offensive—a contaminant that refused to be bleached by the LED purity of the ceiling.
She sat in her combat suit, dust-caked and blackened at the shoulder, boots still marked with the iron-oxide residue of a planet where nothing lived. The room was surgically bare: a single white table, two white chairs, an embedded strip of glass running the table's length that pulsed with the rhythm of her own heartbeat. The air smelt of disinfectant, ozone, and Mana's own dried sweat, the latter not yet noticed by the man across from her.
The Intel-Officer belonged to the room like another piece of equipment. His coat, medical white with a stripe of cold blue at the collar, fit so perfectly it seemed grown rather than tailored. His face—pale, sharply handsome—had the cultivated blankness of someone who'd learned to hide reactions, but his eyes flicked with precise, predatory interest as they tracked the data splaying across the surface of the table.
Mana sat at rigid attention, spine a ruler from pelvis to helmet. Fox had trained her for these interrogations: never fidget, never blink more than the officer, never volunteer a single word unless prompted. Her suit's exo-musculature had been set to neutral so that not even a tremor could betray her. Still, exhaustion pressed at the corners of her vision, and a gritty pain itched beneath her left eyelid.
The officer did not address her immediately. He flicked his fingers over the table, and the glass responded with threads of blue and red, a holographic latticework of her own movements rendered in vector lines and frequency graphs. He watched her for exactly twelve seconds before speaking.
The officer's eyes locked on hers. "Command Sergeant Major M-137, Senior Operative Zero-One. Confirm identity for the record."
"CSM-OP Mana, registry M-137, callsign Senior-Op-01," she replied, the formal designation scraping through her throat like sand.
The officer nodded, the motion perfectly symmetrical. "Mission brief: Extraction of relay beacon from site Lancer-Kappa-22. Hostile presence encountered: Jäger-class entities. Confirm?"
She nodded once. Her helmet hissed in the silence.
"Explain," he said, voice as bright and clean as the light.
Mana recited her report with mechanical precision: "HALO insertion at 0347 hours, LZ coordinates 37.442 by 114.891. Relay beacon located at 0412. First contact with Jäger hostiles at 0429, solo, bearing northeast at 42 degrees. Target Alpha utilized non-standard flanking maneuver, deviation 17% from tactical database. Targets Bravo and Charlie demonstrated coordinated suppression fire, overlapping fields at 30-second intervals. All hostiles neutralized by 0517. Primary objective secured at 0540. Extraction at designated coordinates 37.451 by 114.902." She kept her voice flat, omitting the subsonic frequencies that had vibrated her Core, and the ritualistic markings the last Jäger had traced before she terminated it.
The officer's gaze slid briefly to the left, toward the mirrored wall. Mana felt, rather than saw, the presence on the other side: a slow exhalation, the shift of fabric, bodies leaning toward glass made invisible by design.
"She witnessed the last one draw a glyph," a woman's voice murmured, barely audible to human ears but piped directly into Mana's helmet by the Core. "How does she not flinch?"
"None of them do," said a second, this one baritone and bored. "Not until you make them take the helmet off. They're used to never being out of the loop. It's a kind of… insulation."
The woman: "No. That's false security. What you're seeing is permanent work state. They never really come home."
Inside the box, the Intel-Officer's lips parted a fraction. "You believe these behaviors are adaptive? Not pathological?"
"She's not traumatized," the woman insisted, watching Mana's pupillometrics scroll across her own HUD. "She's operationalizing it. Every memory, every horror—converted to protocol. That's what makes her viable."
"Interesting. So you think this one is a candidate?"
"Insofar as any of them are. She is still running the Controller dialogue in parallel, even though the neural link was severed on entry. She's cycling through checklists and counterfactuals at a background rate three times baseline. She's even monitoring us."
Mana kept her eyes on the officer's, but her attention split: one thread for the man, one for the woman.
The officer's eyes narrowed at her reticence, but he made no comment. Instead, he turned to the data and played the mission back at fifty times speed, kinetic traces flashing through the air above the table.
"Your heart rate jumped 23% at 0431. What happened?" he said, pausing the feed as her heartbeat leapt. "Explain the cause."
She hesitated. "Adaptation. The Jäger mimicked human tactics. Unexpected."
"Unexpected," the officer repeated, as if tasting the word for the first time. "There are also periods of…" he searched for a non-damning word, "…unusual stasis. A gap between standard engagement protocols and execution. Was there malfunction?"
Mana's left index finger tapped twice against her thigh, the motion so slight only the suit's internal sensors would register it. "No," she said, as a bead of sweat crawled down her nape to the micro-ridge at her helmet's base. "I observed behavior inconsistent with prior encounters."
"Such as?" The man's voice cut, crisp as a scalpel.
She considered her answer. "They attempted communication. Nonverbal."
"Nonverbal," he repeated, now less a question than an accusation. "Show me."
Mana inclined her head to the far corner of the room, where a blank panel disguised a ceiling-height screen. At her signal, the holo-table routed a visual: the moment, captured from her helmet, when the Jäger had crouched by its slain comrade and traced the looping sigil in the dust.
The officer watched. Mana watched him.
For a long time, the only movement was the slow play of video frames and the thrum of her own pulse, rendered as a gentle flicker in the embedded table glass.
He enlarged the footage. Again. Once more. The finger-tap was controlled but the pattern not lost on Mana: three repetitions meant panic.
He turned to her, lips pressed thin. "Are you suggesting the Jäger possess a culture of mourning?"
"I am reporting observed behavior. Analysis is your department, sir."
The man's jaw flexed, a flicker of humanity leaking through the cultivated neutrality. "We have seen variants—ritualized postures, even mimicry—but never this." His fingers pinched the dust sigil, stretched it, compared it against a series of reference glyphs. "This is a motif used by the Kollektiven. Not by the Jäger."
Mana held her silence. On the table, her heart rate accelerated by four points. The officer's gaze darted to the biomonitor, then to her eyes, measuring.
He muttered, almost to himself: "They'd sooner die than share protocol. Even at the tactical layer."
He swept the table clear, then drew up a new set of files: a frequency analysis, spectrum lines running jagged with interference. In the center, a brief spike—nearly invisible.
The man leaned in, intensity burning away the sterile mask. "Explain this," he said, and replayed the moment from her audio log.
Mana listened: the sound just before the first Jäger charged, a subharmonic vibration like the memory of a siren.
"Did you perceive this at the time?" the officer asked.
She nodded. "Infrasound. Not in the brief."
The man exhaled, slow and careful. He made a note on his pad, then pressed a button. Above the table, the audio profile twisted into a dense mesh, its harmonics mapped in blood red. He split the mesh, overlaid a reference sample.
The two were almost identical.
Mana watched his composure evaporate. "This is a swarm signal," he whispered. "Kollektiven. Embedded in Jäger comms."
Her own pulse thundered in her ears now, but she betrayed nothing. Instead, she glanced at the frequency, replayed the moment in her mind, the static at the edge of her Core. Maybe Fox had known. Maybe Fox had always known, but protected her from the truth.
The officer stared through her, as if looking for the nest of wires and wetware beneath her skin.
"It's not possible," he said, at last. "We have decades of conflict to prove they are incompatible." He ran the sequence again, voice brittle. "Unless…"
He shook his head. "You will remain on standby for further debrief." His hands trembled as he typed, flagging her file with a pale blue icon and routing it not to his supervisor, but straight to High Directorate. Even Mana, untrained in bureaucratic hierarchies, recognized the color code: P0—existential priority.
He rose. "Wait here. Do not move, do not access external comms, do not—" He stopped himself, breathing slow and even, and left the room.
For a moment, Mana just sat, watching her pulse flatten and slow on the glass. She let her hands fall to the tabletop, flexed her fingers, felt the shudder of fatigue in her bones. She had killed four Jäger, outsmarted a pair of mimics, and survived a surface warzone—but this room, this blank white prison, was the only place she had ever felt truly unsafe.
In the stillness, she wanted to reach for Fox. But the room was shielded, the neural comms pinched shut by jammers built into the walls.
So she waited, a monument in poly-fiber armor, the evidence of her own strangeness spilled like blood across the table.
The relay beacon's last transmission pulsed in the periphery of her HUD, a ghost she couldn't blink away.
She knew better than to trust hope, but for one unguarded heartbeat, she let herself imagine Fox breaking the blackout, a secret message smuggled past the shield.
Instead, there was only the hush of conditioned air, the slow tick of her own pulse, and the sense that whatever she'd brought back from the wasteland was already rewriting the world inside these walls.
The voice arrived as a hairline fracture in the glassy hush—not through the link, but around it, a signal that shouldn't exist.
<
Mana's suit readouts showed zero activity on all neural ports. Not even the diagnostic blip that signified background chatter from Fox's end. The comms were, according to three conflicting overlays, not only dead but excised—severed at the cortical root. Still—
<
Mana didn't move. She kept her face a slab, training her eyes on the inert pulse strip in the table, but her spine rippled cold beneath the flex plates. This was not the Fox she remembered—no warmth, no easy banter, just the hiss of a scalpel through black ice.
<
The words were pure algorithm, a staccato rhythm almost too quick for words. Not sent in packets, not routed through any civilian array Mana recognized. More like a spike forced through the core of her own head. She wanted to ask how, but the fear of external sensors—bugs, bio-monitors, the officer's eyes watching on silent replay—tied her mouth shut.
<
Mana flexed her fingers under the table. In another life, she would have said yes, and meant it. Here, the word would land wrong, a risk.
The voice—Fox, her only anchor—seemed to sense her reluctance.
<
Mana pictured snow. The kind that fell on the simulations of Old Earth, somewhere up north. Heavy, mute, blanketing all noise and color.
<
The door unlocked with a pneumatic sigh. Fox cut off, leaving only the memory of his voice burrowed behind her jaw.
Two figures entered. Not the officer—he'd been a pawn after all. These were older: the woman wore slate gray, not white; the man in the shadow, a lapel badged only with a single black bar. Both moved with the calm of people who expected the room to shape itself around them. Mana straightened, hands flat on the table.
The woman's voice was soft, almost apologetic. "Sergeant Major. My name is Sima. We're doing a quick follow-up. You will answer, but only what you're comfortable recalling."
She slid a box across the table—a palm-sized chunk of glass and metal. A portable resonance scanner, she realized, four generations ahead of what her medics used. The device blinked once, then waited.
The device pulsed, casting a brief, translucent nimbus across the table and her hands. Mana felt the charge even before the light hit—a pressure behind her teeth, the taste of iron before a nosebleed. She kept still, willing her biochemistry to flatline, her thoughts to slip beneath the scanner's sweep. The woman—Sima—waited, her face oddly gentle, as if she pitied Mana for what the scanner might show.
"Protocol is simple," Sima said. The glass chimed, hungry for confession. "If your neural implant has registered any anomalous residuals, you just acknowledge. We don't care about dreams or impressions—only machine-to-machine contact. Understand?"
Mana nodded, slow. Not trusting her voice, not trusting the microbeats of her neck, which the scanner's blue eye tracked alongside the pulse in her wrist.
Sima glanced at the readout, and her pupil contracted, just a hair. "What did you see, when the Jäger dropped the relay beacon?"
Mana forced herself to remember only the image, not what she'd felt: the circle, the loop, the shared gaze. "They knelt beside the body," she said, voice a grater on her throat. "They left a sign, a mark. Then they stood down and waited."
"And you touched it," Sima said, reading her file in real time. "Why?"
"Combat wound," Mana lied. "I had to check for a secondary device. Trap logic."
Sima's lips moved, but the scanner caught her real interest: a tiny flinch of her brow at the word "logic." They wanted to hear about the signal, not her. Mana let the silence settle, the way Fox had taught her. Whoever broke it lost control.
The man in the shadow broke first. "You did not experience any sense of… communion?"
The question hit Mana like a sudden step down in the dark. The word "communion" tasted wrong on her tongue. What she'd experienced was no sacred joining—just raw hunger recognizing her as both enemy and kin, a predator acknowledging another apex creature before deciding whether to hunt or retreat.
"No," Mana said, eyes level. "It felt like pain."
Sima nodded, but her eyes lingered a half-second too long. "The next time your Core spikes 0.3 milliseconds before your mouth opens," she said, voice still gentle, "try not to blink." She smiled. "You're cleared."
The scanner's light faded. Mana's hands ached. She realized she'd been grinding her nails into her palms, hard enough to leave new crescent scars in the old scar tissue.
"Take your time," Sima said. "You're not needed for another twelve hours. The next mission will be archival only—no live engagements."
Mana tried to read her intent, but the face was already smoothing over, workshop-perfect. Whatever passed for comfort in Sima's domain, it wasn't meant for Mana's species.
Sima left first, taking the scanner. The man with the black bar delayed, then paused at the exit. He looked back—not at Mana, but a point above her left shoulder.
She rose, locking her arms and legs into the parade-rest configuration, and cycled her HUD to privacy mode. The white room blurred at its edges, replaced by the mission parameters: site Omega-Mu-7, deep in the volcanic wastes of Kestra's third satellite. Objective: recover lost survey data. "Archival only," Sima had said.
No live engagements.
She snorted, a dry bark in the closed helmet. There were always live engagements. Sometimes the fights didn't even have bodies attached.
The walls shivered as the door clicked open. A silent escort—three armored MPs—waited to transfer her to the launch bays. Standard for flagged assets. She followed, zero resistance, boots echoing on the polymer tile. The MPs guided her into the lift, never speaking, their faces blank behind mirrored visors.
In the descending silence, Mana listened for Fox. There was nothing. Not even static. Just the memory of his voice, and of the way he'd always managed to reach her, no matter the walls or the watchers.
The corridor wasn't truly empty. Mana registered the junior cadets before they saw her—three heartbeats quickening, pupils dilating, muscles tensing. She cataloged their reactions automatically: threat assessment zero, combat utility negligible. Her boots struck the hex-plate floor in measured, deliberate beats as she passed. Two sergeants with campaign ribbons and carbon-scored armor plates stood near the junction. Their conversation died mid-sentence. The taller one's hand twitched toward a salute, then froze halfway. Neither met her eyes directly. Mana kept walking, the silence expanding behind her like a wake.
She passed under retinal scanners and cameras—each one paused for a microsecond as it verified her biometrics, then resumed its passive scrutiny. The walls here were gunmetal gray, their only decoration a narrow stripe in military blue, broken every twelve meters by a sealed blast door. The effect was disorienting; it always felt as if the base was standing at attention, waiting for someone important to pass. She was not important, only necessary.
At the end of the corridor, her door opened with a hiss. The nameplate read "CSM-OP M-137" with no rank insignia, though she outranked every soldier who'd escorted her here. The quarters assigned to Command Sergeant Major "Chief" were barely larger than a walk-in closet: a standard-issue cot, a water basin, a sliver of light-absorbing mirror, and a recessed shelf with a data terminal that had never functioned in her memory.
She unfastened her helmet and set it down on the shelf. For a moment she just stood there, head bowed, hands loose at her sides. Without the helmet's interface, her own senses felt raw, the aftertaste of ozone and blood still sharp in her nose. She counted five slow breaths, then peeled off the rest of the suit: torso, arms, gloves, boots. She arranged everything with military precision, not out of fear of reprimand, but because ritual was the only thing that held the cracks together.
She reached under the cot, fingers searching the adhesive seam she'd carved weeks ago. The tiny data chip came loose, invisible in the dim light. She cupped it in her palm, closed her fist around it. It was absurd, the object—barely a gram, a counterfeit even, the only thing in her cell that was not assigned, tracked, or monitored. The only thing she had ever stolen, and she had done it not for rebellion, but for a memory she could not quite name.
Mana sat cross-legged on the cot, shoulders hunched. She ran her thumb along the ridges of the chip, as if it could transmit meaning through skin. She pressed it to the underside of the terminal, where a hidden port waited. The screen flickered, its glow harsh and blue.
For a minute, the world dissolved into pixels and the hollow rumble of the Halo main menu. She hovered over "Resume Campaign," thumb twitching. Fox would call her a child, but Fox was not here—she was cut off, no neural relay, the airwaves dead.
She started the mission.
The Chief spawned in, weapon ready, horizon burning with the color of an alien sun. The music swelled in old, familiar patterns; she felt her chest loosen for the first time in hours. She played through the first fight on muscle memory, the controls as natural as breathing. She wondered, not for the first time, if the old humans had ever known what it was to fight without someone else's eyes watching, without every bullet and blood drop logged and analyzed and sent up the chain.
The mission ended. Mana let the Chief idle in a field of glass, watching the clouds move. She wondered what it would be like to live in a world where victory and loss were only for yourself.
She shut the terminal off. The room felt colder now, the walls closer.
She unclipped the neural interface cap from the base of her skull, setting it beside the helmet with a click. The ports along her scalp stood out in angry red, skin pinched and tender, but she ran her fingers along them anyway. It hurt, in a way she welcomed. Physical pain was always preferable to the drift of her mind.
She closed her eyes and tried to sleep, but her thoughts circled back, like birds to a carcass, to the interview room and the way the Intel-Officer's face had drained of color when he saw the signal. She could still see it: the overlapping frequencies, the signature that should have been impossible. The silence that had followed.
"Fox," she whispered into the dark, out of habit. "Are you there?"
Nothing answered. The air had the taste of emptiness, as if the room itself held its breath.
She lay still. Seconds stretched.
At length, the silence shivered. A hum, faint and shy, at the back of her skull.
"Mana?" Fox's voice—no longer the steady, practiced cadence of her handler, but thin and uncertain, a wire drawn too tight.
She said, "I'm here." Her face remained still. Fox was always there, except for when she most wanted him to be.
He hesitated, or maybe the relay lagged, or maybe there was simply no protocol for what came next.
"Fox, was war das Signal? Das, was du nicht in der Datenbank fandest?" Her tongue caught the syllables awkwardly—she was never good at the base language, but Fox understood the intent.
Still cross-legged, still hunched, her fingers found the edge of the blanket – three traces right, three traces left.
A pause so long she thought the link had dropped again. Then: "Ich weiß es nicht, Mana." The admission landed heavy. "Und das macht mir Angst."
That chilled her more than anything on the desert floor. She had never heard Fox admit fear, not in a hundred missions, not even the time they had watched an entire company vanish into a hole in reality outside Bastion Acheron. The only certainty she'd ever had was the voice in her skull, cool and gentle, even when it told her to kill.
Mana rolled onto her side, curled knees to chest, and let the silence settle in again. She reached behind her neck, fingers brushing the Core implant. It was warm, alive, the only living thing in the room other than herself.
The symbol floated in her memory – twin circles, three connecting lines. Eden. The word still tasted like nightmare.
She wondered if Fox could feel her, through the neural link—a ghost pulse, a shudder of breath. She hoped so, because it meant she was not yet lost, not fully.
She closed her eyes and waited for sleep, but it never came.
The room lit up in a slash of blue, her neural interface cap flickering as it rebooted without warning. The base's night cycle ended abruptly, the door unsealing with a hiss. Red alert: her orders flashed in the air above her cot, crisp and glowing.
«CSM-OP M-137, prepare for immediate deployment. Reconnaissance mission, priority zero. Report to hangar in thirty minutes. Senior-OP-01 clearance required for briefing materials. Further instructions to follow.»
She read it twice, then three times, the meaning no less clear for the repetition. She was going back out, but this time the target was not the relay, or the Jäger, or even herself. It was the anomaly in the signal. The thing that had left Fox speechless.
Mana slipped into her suit, the fabric biting against her raw skin. She fastened the helmet, ignoring the sharp twinge as it locked into the ports. Her hands moved with practiced speed, but her mind lagged a step behind.
"Fox," she said, quieter than before. "We go together, right?"
The voice that answered was thin, but real. "Always."
She palmed the Halo chip, stared at it for a second, and then placed it carefully back beneath the cot. For after.
Mana stepped into the corridor, and let the door seal behind her. The world outside was already awake, lights bracing for the next disaster.
She did not know what waited at the end of her orders. She only knew that she would go, and that Fox would follow, even if the road led into the blank places where maps could not reach.
And if the silence on the other side of the signal was fear—her own, Fox's, the universe's—she would carry it as she always had: in her chest, burning and alone, until someone told her to stop.