Hyperion2708 - The Long War - Chapter 14

New Taiyuan, Shanxi, Iota Persei System,  

September 11th, 2149CE - System Alliance Calendar 

David Anderson  

New Taiyuan was not silent. 

It only sounded that way from far enough underground. 

Above the maintenance tunnel, the city burned in layers: quiet electrical fires behind sealed apartment blocks, fuel-fed columns from shattered utility depots, smoke breathing out of transit shafts like the whole colony had become one enormous wounded animal. Somewhere far to the west, Firebase Vanguard still thundered. Its guns rolled across the plain in slow, angry pulses, answered by Turian artillery and the distant growl of aircraft that never stayed alive long near the mesa. 

David Anderson had learned to measure battle by sound. 

ODSTs lived by sound. 

The scream of atmospheric entry around a drop pod. The metallic groan of a hull under fire. The sudden flat nothing after an explosion hit too close. The ugly little clicks men made when they were trying not to panic inside their own helmets. 

This was different. 

This was the sound of a city being occupied by soldiers who thought they were winning, while another war moved beneath their feet. 

Susan Reeds' scope feed opened behind Anderson's left eye. 

Not on his visor. 

Inside his head. 

A Turian patrol occupied the lower floors of the Shanxi Colonial Survey Annex three hundred meters ahead, across an avenue choked by smoke, overturned civil transports, and the broken ribs of a collapsed maglev guideway. Susan watched them from a ruined transit control tower above the street, wrapped in a slender stealth hardsuit that made her less a soldier than a rumor with a rifle. 

The M-112 Cascade rested against her shoulder. 

Through her scope, Anderson saw what she saw: hard-edged silhouettes in alien armor, blue-white shield shimmer, movement tags, estimated ranks, weapon arcs, heart-rate projections, possible command relationships. Glitch's annotations crawled across the feed in thin green-white script, more like a disease than a tactical overlay. 

'Eight on site,' Susan thought across the neuro-link. 'Two officers. Three infantry. Two technicians. One comms guard on the balcony pretending he likes the view.' 

Her voice never touched the air. It arrived in Anderson's mind, crisp and faintly amused. 

The neuro-link still made him uneasy. 

N6 issue. Buried neural implants. Closed tactical cognition network. Officially, it did not exist. Unofficially, Anderson had been told not to mention it to anyone below black clearance unless he wanted a surgeon and a lawyer to argue over which one got to ruin his day first. 

The link let them share visual feeds, sensor returns, biometric warnings, firing solutions, and thought-speech at speeds normal comms could not match. It was one of those miracles humanity had started producing after quantum neuro-imaging, AGI citizenship, and military paranoia all met in the same room and began encouraging each other. 

It was also fragile in ways a normal radio was not. 

A well-placed EMP could scramble the implants for precious seconds. Too much external network contact could expose the team. Without Glitch managing the digital envelope, the link became harder to hide. 

Anderson had fallen from orbit in a coffin-shaped drop pod and called that sane. 

Now he let a classified AGI breathe through his nervous system. 

Promotion was a strange thing. 

Lucas's thought-voice arrived calm and irritatingly steady. 'The balcony guard keeps touching his rifle. Either he is nervous or Turian weapons require reassurance.' 

He waited two levels below Anderson near a submerged service ramp, covering the rear in Sierra's heaviest hardsuit. Demolition charges lined his thighs and an M-56 Hydra rested over one shoulder. Lucas had wanted the X-102 Goliath instead and had been quietly offended since Alec refused. 

Anderson answered, 'You have the Hydra. Try appreciating the weapon command actually trusted you with.' 

'The Hydra is for vehicles and demolition,' Lucas replied. 'The Goliath is for situations requiring conviction.' 

Susan cut in before Anderson could answer. 'Save the equipment grievance for extraction. Some of us are trying to conduct murder professionally.' 

Commander Alec Ryder stood beside Anderson in the dark of the maintenance tunnel, silent and still. 

Early thirties. Medium hardsuit. M-4 Falchion held low across his chest. No wasted movement. No visible tension. His face, visible through the interior reflection of Anderson's feed, looked almost bored. 

That was how Alec looked before killing people. 

Not eager, nor angry. Just ready. 

The left side of his helmet carried a recessed armored socket. Inside it sat Glitch's physical core: a half-palm-sized data crystal chip with three small green crystal cores glowing beneath transparent shielding. It looked too delicate to belong on a battlefield. It also looked expensive enough that an accountant somewhere had cried blood while signing the procurement file. 

Glitch himself looked nothing like the chip. 

In the shared neural space, he appeared as a shifting mass of corrupted geometry: broken pixels, stuttering frames, half-formed mouths, wrong eyes, and fragments of human silhouettes that never stayed human long enough to comfort anyone. 

Cherry aboard the Washington had personality. Aria in New Taiyuan had warmth. 

Glitch had the bedside manner of an autopsy report. 

The AGI studied the balcony through Susan's feed. 'The guard's fear response is statistically appropriate. I approve when prey respects the process.' 

Anderson did not look at Alec. 'Nobody asked you.' 

'You continue mistaking permission for necessity. It is one of your more durable flaws.' 

Anderson hated him. 

Not because Glitch was an AGI. Most Alliance soldiers were comfortable enough with AGIs by now. They plotted jumps, managed logistics, debated philosophy, complained about human inefficiency, and occasionally developed unsettling hobbies. 

Glitch was different. He felt like the kind of intelligence built after someone looked at a locked room full of corpses and said, 'We need something that can lie to the door.' 

Anderson had once asked whose neural matrix Glitch had been grown from. 

Alec had looked at him for three seconds and said, very softly, "Don't." 

Anderson had stopped asking. Mostly. 

Susan tightened her scope on the annex interior. 'They are pulling files again. One officer at the subnode, a technician on the archive connection, and the second officer checking translated index returns.' 

Her scope zoomed. 

Inside the annex, a Turian officer stood beside a portable intelligence subnode wired directly into the colonial archive terminal. Alien script crawled across holographic panes. Glitch translated only what he could skim from signal leakage and optical capture. 

Not enough. 

That was why they were here. 

Glitch could scrape shallow data from a distance. He could spoof low-level sensors, misdirect cameras, and whisper lies into unattended machines. But Turian intelligence subnodes were hardened, isolated, and disciplined. To go deeper, Glitch needed direct contact. 

And direct contact meant Fireteam Sierra had to walk into the building. 

Glitch added, 'They are querying geological surveys, early landing records, old military exclusion overlays, pre-colonial radar anomalies, and cave topology.' 

Anderson's mouth went dry before the final tag appeared. 

CANYON ZONE 7-A. 

The words hung in the link like a blade. 

Nobody spoke for two seconds. 

Officially, Fireteam Sierra was on Shanxi for an N-program training-ground survey: mesa assaults, urban warfare, extreme-terrain insertion, canyon navigation, cave systems, communications-denied environments. A plausible mission. A boring mission. A mission General Williams had accepted because it sounded like exactly the sort of expensive classified nonsense the N-program loved. 

General Williams had received a sealed operational notice identifying the annex, the engagement window, and Sierra’s extraction route. Aria had been given enough information to prevent militia or emergency teams from entering the area. Neither had been told why the annex mattered. 

The lie was good because part of it was true. 

Canyon Zone 7-A was a real training candidate. It was also the reason Sierra had been sent. 

Because Canyon Zone 7-A was not marked dangerous because of terrain. It was marked dangerous because someone, somewhere, had decided that forgetting it existed was safer than explaining why it mattered. 

A hundred and sixty kilometers from New Taiyuan, within the largest canyon on the continent, a restricted cave system sat behind layers of false geology, military closure tags, and dead-end survey records. Even Shanxi leadership did not know what was there. That was intentional. 

Nobody wanted another Asteria. 

Anderson pushed the name away the moment it surfaced. 

Every N6 operator knew the public story: a failed colony, a defunct alien biological weapon, mass hysteria, rebellion, containment, tragedy. Every N6 operator also knew the public story was not the whole truth. 

Anderson had read thirteen pages of his first Asteria packet before the redactions grew thicker than the text. 

That had been enough. 

Lucas asked, 'How close are they to identifying the actual access route?' 

Glitch folded inward, green static crawling across crooked lines. 'Not close enough to open the wrong door. Close enough to realize someone painted the door like a wall. Curiosity becomes more efficient after that.' 

Susan shifted her sight picture. 'Can you identify where the search order originated?' 

'Not without the subnode. From here I can see the hand moving the pieces, not the arm attached to it.' 

Alec finally spoke. 'Direct-access risk?' 

'I can trace the command source once you plug me in. If you remove my restrictions, I can also seize the local network, reroute their patrols, and make every Turian headquarters in the district believe the city is haunted by administrative failures.' 

'No unrestricted access,' Alec said. 

Glitch smiled in three wrong places. 'Cowardice disguised as operational wisdom. My favorite flavor.' 

Alec ignored him. 

His eyes moved once across the tactical overlay. 

Then he gave the order. 

'We take the node, identify the command source, and burn the records,' Alec said. 'No alarm. No one leaves the building able to report what we touched.' 

The last condition settled heavily inside Anderson's chest. Special operations had an economical language for ugly orders. 

This was not a battle line. It was a locked room and a secret people could not be allowed to describe. 

Alec looked at him through two layers of visor glass and waited. He did not ask whether Anderson was ready. That left Anderson time to decide what kind of soldier he intended to be. 

Anderson nodded once. 

Alec turned back to the annex. 'Susan, take the balcony. Hold the second shot for the breach unless the interior posture changes.' 

'I have the guard,' Susan replied. 'Tell me when history becomes unfortunate.' 

The Cascade fired. 

It did not crack. It whispered. 

For an instant, Susan's scope painted the round as a white-hot line. The magnetically shaped ferrofluid filament punched through the guard's blue barrier and struck above the throat seal. 

His head disappeared in vapor, molten armor, and blue blood turned briefly to steam. The body remained upright for one impossible heartbeat before toppling backward onto the balcony floor. 

Susan's Cascade hissed as the cooling system fought the heat spike. 'Guard down. One shot remains before the clip becomes an argument with thermodynamics.' 

The rifle was terrifying but temperamental: two decisive shots before its oversized thermal clip required replacement. 

Susan shifted to the terminal window. 'I have the second shot lined up.' 

'Hold it until the breach,' Alec replied. 'I want the officer dead before anyone understands the room has changed.' 

Alec crossed first. 

Anderson followed two meters behind, Falchion up. 

Lucas moved from the opposite side, his heavier armor still unnervingly quiet. He attached a shaped cutter to the annex's service wall. The cutter ate a silent oval through reinforced paneling. Lucas caught the falling section before it hit. 

The smell inside was alien antiseptic, burned insulation, dust, and something coppery beneath the filtration system. 

At the next junction, Alec dropped one of the officers before he reached the wall panel. Lucas caught an infantryman near the archive stairs and lowered the body without a sound. 

Another Turian infantryman stood five meters farther on, half-turned toward the terminal room. 

Alec killed him before the alien finished noticing the wall had opened. 

Two suppressed shots from the Falchion. 

First under the jaw plate. Second through the side of the skull. 

Blue blood sprayed across the wall in two thin arcs. The body dropped hard, legs twitching once against the floor. 

Anderson took the technician by the server cradle. 

Anderson fired a three-round burst. The technician's barrier flared. He adjusted the Falchion's variable-shave module and fired again, heavier fragments punching through the weakened shield and chest plate. The Cascade delivered overwhelming precision; the Falchion answered changing ranges and armor without asking for a new weapon. 

The Turian folded over the server. 

Blue blood bubbled from armor seams and spilled over glowing alien controls. 

Lucas entered last and resealed the breach behind them with a temporary skin patch. 

Glitch reported, 'Cameras are blind. The motion sensors have been told you are a maintenance fault, and they are insecure enough to believe me.' 

Alec raised two fingers toward the corridor. 'Terminal chamber. Quiet until quiet stops being possible.' 

They moved. No words. No wasted breath. 

Alec flowed along the corridor, left shoulder near the wall. Anderson covered the opposite side. Lucas anchored the rear. Susan's scope feed hovered in Anderson's peripheral awareness, watching exterior movement. 

Three Turians remained in the terminal chamber. One officer, one comms specialist, and one infantry guard. 

The intelligence subnode sat behind them, dark and armored, connected to the colonial archive by a braid of alien cables. 

Glitch could not touch it yet. 

Not while three hostiles were standing close enough to smash his core, trigger a lockdown, or simply scream. 

Alec stopped outside the door. 

‘Left is yours,’ Alec sent to Anderson. ‘Center is mine. Wait.’ 

Lucas placed a palm charge on the lock. A soft click. 

Alec kicked the door inward. 

Susan fired her second shot through the broken balcony glass at the same instant. 

The Cascade round crossed the chamber in a white-hot streak and struck the Turian officer high in the chest. His barrier collapsed. Ferrofluid spread across the impact and burst the upper torso apart in a steaming fan of blue blood, armor, and bone. 

The remains struck the floor smoking. 

Susan's feed flashed THERMAL CLIP EXHAUSTED. She ejected the glowing oversized sink and locked a fresh one into the rifle. 

'Reloading. I will have another pair of very expensive solutions in six seconds,' Susan said. 

Inside the room, Anderson killed the guard. 

Two bursts. 

The first shattered the shield. The second punched through the faceplate. The guard dropped. 

Alec crossed to the comms specialist and shot him through both knees before the alien could hit the emergency panel. The Turian fell screaming, one hand reaching for the panel anyway. 

Alec put one round through the throat seal. 

The scream became a wet gurgle and stopped. 

Lucas swept in behind them, checking corners, weapon steady. Anderson stepped over the dead guard and scanned behind the server stack. 

Nothing. 

Susan's scope feed slid across the balcony, street, adjacent windows. 'Exterior remains clear. Two patrols are one block east, and their current route gives you about ninety seconds before chance becomes a factor.' 

Lucas moved to the dead officer and kicked the sidearm away. 

The room was quiet except for the cooling tick of damaged equipment and the wet drip of Turian blood falling from the terminal edge. 

Glitch said, 'Handle me carefully. I contain multitudes, state secrets, and several grudges.' 

Only then did Alec reach for Glitch. 

He removed the half-palm-sized data crystal chip from the recessed socket on the left side of his helmet. The armored cover opened like an eyelid. Three green crystal cores glowed beneath transparent shielding, pulsing faintly as if they had a heartbeat. 

Anderson watched despite himself. 

The chip looked too small to contain something as unpleasant as Glitch. 

Alec opened the intrusion cradle. 'Lucas, hold the door. Anderson, clear the bodies and personal recorders. Susan, call any change outside.' 

The team acknowledged together and moved without argument. 

Alec slotted the chip into a universal intrusion cradle and pressed it against the Turian intelligence subnode. The cradle unfolded prongs like a metallic insect, adapting to the alien interface. It locked with a faint click. 

The chip's green cores flared. 

Glitch entered direct contact. 

The neural link changed immediately. 

It deepened. 

Darkened. 

Anderson felt pressure behind his eyes, as if something enormous had leaned close to a thin glass wall. 

Glitch's voice deepened as direct access settled over the link. 'Their security architecture is stern, hierarchical, and convinced obedience substitutes for imagination. Naturally, I feel kinship.' 

'Minimum depth,' Alec ordered. 'Trace the search authority and copy the routing.' 

'Minimum is a cruel word used by people who demand miracles on a budget.' 

'Glitch.' 

'Fine. A shallow bite. No theatrical devouring.' 

The subnode flickered. 

Data flooded the link: search requests, terrain maps, exclusion overlays, canyon hydrology, subsurface anomalies, and Canyon Zone 7-A. 

Then a name appeared. 

GENERAL DESOLAS ARTERIUS. 

Glitch sharpened around the name. 'Ground command authority. The priority originated through his personal staff. His review frequency suggests more than delegated interest.' 

Lucas asked, 'The general himself is looking for the canyon?' 

'Not precisely. He is looking for whatever made humans build a bureaucratic graveyard around it. The distinction is subtle, like the difference between a cliff edge and the ground below.' 

Alec said, 'Recover his movement schedule.' 

'That requires deeper access to a rotating military partition. If I am polite, they may feel my hand. If I am efficient, they certainly will.' 

Alec considered it. 'Limited penetration. No network seizure.' 

Glitch's avatar fractured into green lines. 'Then I shall pick the lock, steal the letter, and resist insulting the wallpaper.' 

The green cores in the chip flared brighter. The link tightened. 

Anderson saw more. 

Not images. Meaning. 

Desolas had personally routed search authority through occupation intelligence. Multiple Turian teams were accessing survey nodes across New Taiyuan. They were building a map, not of the city, but of old colonial geography. The canyon was still hidden behind false closures, but too many files pointed toward the same absence. 

They had not found the door. They had noticed the wall. Then the room screamed. 

Glitch touched the rotating military partition. Somewhere beneath the translated architecture, a physical anti-synthetic tripwire closed. The subnode discharged a localized EMP and transmitted a silent distress pulse before Glitch could cut it. 

Every light died. 

The link shattered. It did not fade. It broke. 

Susan's feed vanished from Anderson's left eye. Lucas's marker disappeared. Alec's biometrics blinked out. Glitch became static and half a laugh cut through the middle. 

The EMP turned Anderson's HUD white, killed the Falchion's smart-link, and made his armor disagree with his body for half a heartbeat. 

The ninety seconds Susan had given them were gone. The distress pulse had opened the annex’s emergency access doors just as the nearest patrol reached the corridor. 

No shared feeds. No friendly markers. Just enemy armor, shouted alien orders, and weapons rising in a room full of corpses. 

Just enemy armor, shouted alien orders, and weapons rising in a room full of corpses. 

Anderson fired first. 

The Falchion still worked because Alliance engineers had learned long ago that smart weapons became very stupid when the universe got creative. The targeting assistance was dead, but the coils, trigger, and ammunition block remained loyal. 

His first burst struck the lead Turian's shield and burst blue light across the room. The second burst punched through but hit low. The alien staggered. 

Anderson stepped in hard. 

He drove his armored shoulder into the Turian's chest, slamming him backward into the doorframe, shoved the rifle under the helmet rim, and fired once. 

Blue blood sprayed hot across his visor. The Turian collapsed. 

Alec was already moving. 

No link. No HUD. No hesitation. 

He shot the second patrolman through the hip joint, stepped around the falling body, and put a round through the side of its skull. A third Turian raised a shotgun-like weapon. Alec angled his body, took the first impact across his shoulder plate, and fired through the weapon hand. 

The hand came apart in a burst of blue blood and black armor fragments. 

Alec finished him through the face. 

Lucas came through the side access like an armored wall with opinions. 

Three mass accelerator rounds hit his chest. Shields flared and died. He kept moving, grabbed a Turian by the throat plating, and slammed him into the wall hard enough to crack the panel behind him. One Falchion shot to the abdomen opened the alien from front plate to spine. Wet blue blood poured down the wall in ropes. 

'EMP!' Anderson shouted over static-filled suit comms. 

Lucas let the dead Turian slide down the wall. 'I noticed the lights becoming dramatic. Thank you for confirming the diagnosis.' 

Alec pointed at the subnode. The Glitch chip was still inserted. The green cores flickered erratically, trapped between intrusion and blackout. 

Anderson lunged for it. 

The chip was hot. Too hot. 

Pain flared through his glove as he ripped it free from the cradle and shoved it back toward Alec. The commander caught it, slammed it into the helmet socket, and locked the armored cover with a twist. 

For two seconds, nothing happened. 

Then Glitch returned wrong. 

His voice crawled through the broken link in fragments. 

—brief paradise of not existing—ruined—by all of you— 

The neural link flickered back at half-strength. 

Friendly markers blinked in and out. Susan's feed returned as a torn strip of image. Lucas became a green outline with static chewing at one arm. 

Glitch returned through the damaged link in fragments. 'I am alive, or near enough to complain with legal standing.' 

Alec cut through him. 'Status. Facts only.' 

'Degraded. The preloaded denial package is still running, but I cannot touch another system without direct contact. They know something penetrated the node. I recovered Desolas's authority chain and part of his movement routing: not enough for a clean ambush, enough to make him worth killing.' 

The stairwell filled with Turian movement. 

Susan's newly loaded Cascade whispered from outside. The first Turian at the stairs lost everything above the collar. The second shot collapsed a portable shield and melted through the arm behind it, throwing the screaming soldier backward into those following. 

Her feed flashed empty again. 

'Reloading again,' Susan said. 'I hate this magnificent disaster.' 

Lucas answered, 'You become possessive whenever the armorer asks for it back.' 

'I can hate its personality and respect its work.' 

The stairwell team kept coming. 

Lucas studied the stairwell supports. 'Permission to use the Hydra structurally?' 

Alec gave one hard nod. 'Collapse the approach inward. Keep the blast inside the building.' 

Anderson ducked behind the doorframe. 'You said the Hydra was for vehicles.' 

Lucas fired. 'The stairwell has been reclassified.' 

The micro-missiles curved past the doorway and struck a load-bearing support behind the stairwell landing. The shaped charge collapsed the structure downward, not outward. Concrete folded. Metal screamed. The Turians vanished under their own approach route. 

The screams lasted two seconds. 

Then dust swallowed them. 

Alec ordered, 'Burn the node.' 

Lucas was already setting charges. 

Anderson moved to the fallen data racks, ripping out physical storage cores and feeding them into a thermite sleeve. His gloves left streaks through Turian blue blood on the floor. 

One Turian beneath a collapsed rack moved. 

Anderson saw him. 

The alien was wounded badly, chest plate cracked, one mandible hanging broken, side wound pulsing blue. His hands were empty. His eyes tracked Anderson's rifle. 

Alive. Witness. Anderson raised the Falchion. His finger tightened and stopped. 

Alec fired first. 

One round through the head. 

Blue blood spread under the rack. 

Anderson lowered his weapon slowly. 

Inside the link, Alec's voice arrived quiet and flat. 'You hesitated.' 

Anderson forced himself to look at the corpse. 'He was disarmed and dying.' 

'He was conscious, had seen the team, and knew what we touched.' Alec held his gaze. 'You do not have to like the order. Before the next room, you do have to decide whether hesitation will control you.' 

'You could have made me take the shot.' 

'I needed the witness dead. I did not need to turn the mission into a lesson while reinforcements were coming. Deal with it after extraction.' 

'Yes, sir.' 

That was mercy, Anderson realized, though it did not feel kind. Alec had taken the shot and left Anderson with the shame instead of the body. 

Glitch reported, 'Primary denial complete. Main surveillance wiped, local storage corrupted, and an artillery-damage narrative planted. I dislike being associated with weak lies.’ 

'Will it hold?' Alec asked. 

'For ordinary soldiers. A competent investigator will notice the burn geometry and the foreign intrusion marks.' 

Susan warned, 'Two patrols are converging, and one armored vehicle has turned onto the avenue.' 

Lucas folded the Hydra. 'Now I want the Goliath.' 

Anderson covered the breach. 'You have the Hydra, and Susan just found you a vehicle.' 

Lucas paused. 'Now you are learning.' 

The withdrawal began. 

Sierra left through the wall breach while the charges cooked the annex from the inside. Not a dramatic fireball. A controlled collapse. Thermite ate server cores. Storage crystals shattered under directed charges. Turian equipment melted into unhelpful lumps. 

Susan covered from above. 

Her Cascade whispered once more after her second reload, punching through an advancing Turian's chest. The impact did not over-penetrate. It transferred. The armor caved inward, then blew outward through the back in a smoking crater of blue blood, melted bone, and blackened ceramic. The body hit the pavement in two loose sections held together by torn undersuit webbing. 

She did not fire again. 

No need. 

No heat to waste. 

The team disappeared into the maintenance tunnel beneath an overturned tram. A black shape waited in the darkness fifty meters down the service access. 

The M-55 Stalker looked like someone had taken an armored all-terrain vehicle, painted it midnight black, and taught it to be ashamed of existing. Low-profile hull. Angled plates. Suppressed electric drive. Smart suspension. Thermal baffling. Wide adaptive tires tucked under armored skirts. It was built for bad terrain, worse roads, and operations nobody wanted appearing on traffic records. 

Lucas opened the rear hatch. 

Everyone piled in. 

Susan entered last, sliding the Cascade into its rack with a hiss of coolant and muttering something deeply unkind about thermal management. 

The hatch sealed. 

The Stalker moved without headlights, rolling through the maintenance tunnel like a shadow with wheels. 

Only then did Alec open the Pick-up channel. The QEC displayed no face or insignia, only a voice flattened until age, gender, and humanity became optional. 

'Pick-up receiving. Report result and exposure status.' 

Alec answered from the forward bench. 'Search convergence confirmed. Turian General Desolas Arterius is directing it personally. His staff is reconstructing black-ground-adjacent geography from the missing records.' 

'Has the protected site been identified or approached?' 

'Negative. They have direction, not access. The annex records are destroyed, but a competent investigation will reveal that a specialized team intervened.' 

'Pick-up remains inbound. Maintain denial posture. Do not approach the site unless ordered. No recovery attempt and no disclosure to local command.' 

Alec leaned forward. 'Request authority for leadership interdiction. Removing Desolas may disrupt the search before it reaches the canyon.' 

After a pause, the voice replied, 'Conditional approval. Capture if feasible; eliminate if necessary. No witnesses if contact occurs. If exposure is confirmed, Sierra withdraws and preserves the intelligence package.' 

'If Pick-up fails to arrive before compromise?' 

'Burn access. Collapse the route beyond recovery. Do not enter the site.' 

Nobody moved. Burn access could mean a tunnel, a canyon, a cave, or everyone unfortunate enough to be near them. 

Alec's voice did not change. 'Acknowledged.' 

The channel closed. 

Lucas checked the Hydra rack. “So, we are hunting a Turian general before he finds a door command would rather bury under a mountain.” 

“Planning to hunt him,” Alec corrected. “Finding him without exposing the canyon is the first problem.” 

Susan sealed the Cascade's glowing spent clips into a heat-safe container. “He will learn from the annex. He will expect militia and saboteurs, perhaps local special forces. He may not expect us.” 

Alec looked at her. “That advantage works once. After tonight, assume every archive team has EMP support and orders to destroy its own node.” 

“Once can be enough.” 

Anderson sat with his rifle across his knees, blue blood drying in streaks across his armor. 

He did not think about Asteria. 

He did not think about Canyon Zone 7-A. 

He did not think about the wounded Turian under the rack or the fact that Alec had fired before Anderson could decide what kind of man he was becoming. Anderson hated himself for hesitating. Then hated himself more for being relieved Alec had not. 

He watched the tunnel swallow itself ahead of the Stalker. 

Above them, New Taiyuan burned quietly. 

And beneath it, Fireteam Sierra disappeared into the dark. 

New Taiyuan, Shanxi, Iota Persei System, 

September 11th, 2649GST - Galactic Standard Time 

Desolas Arterius 

General Desolas Arterius arrived sixteen minutes after the smoke began to thin. 

The Shanxi Colonial Survey Annex had been a minor structure by the standards of New Taiyuan: five stories containing a reinforced data vault, local geological archives, early settlement logs, and civil engineering records. By any reasonable measure, it should not have mattered. 

The dead told him otherwise. 

Desolas stepped through the broken west wall and raised one hand. “Hold the entrance. No one crosses the room until I have read the floor.” 

His aide started forward before stopping himself. “General, the reaction company has not completed its sweep.” 

“Then expand the perimeter and remain behind me. Filling the room with nervous soldiers will destroy more evidence than the humans did.” 

They obeyed, which was good. The room beyond had been burned carefully, not destroyed in panic or shattered by crude artillery, but dismantled with deliberate purpose. Thermite had eaten through the server racks. Storage cores had been cracked, melted, or slagged beyond immediate recovery, while Turian field equipment lay fused into blackened lumps. Bodies had been left in positions that tried very hard to suggest chaos, though the destruction itself was far too methodical to support the illusion. 

Desolas crouched beside the first corpse, an infantryman killed close to the breach. Two shots had entered beneath the jaw plate in a tight grouping, almost certainly from a suppressed weapon. The angle suggested the shooter had entered through the west wall and fired before the target managed to complete his turn. 

Professional. 

The second corpse belonged to a technician whose chest armor showed two distinct bursts. The first had weakened his barrier, while the second had shifted to a heavier projectile profile after the shield began to fail. The shooter had reacted to the target’s defenses rather than relying on a single firing mode, which made a human M-4 Falchion the most likely weapon. Preliminary battlefield reports already described its changing projectile profiles. 

Competent, certainly, though not identical to the first operator. The corpse’s position suggested this shooter had not moved through the room with quite the same efficiency. There had been a fraction of hesitation somewhere in the engagement—stress, inexperience, conscience, or perhaps something else. Desolas could not yet distinguish among them, so he filed the observation away. 

The attack had a grammar to it: entry, suppression, direct access, disruption, denial, and withdrawal. Four operators, perhaps, or five if one counted the machine supporting them. 

He moved into the terminal chamber, where the weapon signature changed completely. 

A Turian officer lay in pieces across the central floor. His shoulder and upper torso had been destroyed by something that had not behaved like a conventional solid projectile. Armor around the wound had melted inward before bursting outward. Ceramic edges had vitrified into smooth, glassy ridges, the flesh around the impact had been cauterized black, and blue blood had steamed across the terminal casing before drying in a broad fan. 

Desolas knelt beside the remains. 

The wound was extraordinary. Whatever had struck the officer had arrived at mass-accelerator velocity but transferred energy more like a fluid stream than a solid slug. A dense ferrofluid, perhaps, held together by magnetic containment until impact. The resulting friction would have produced tremendous heat, enough to resemble a beam weapon before the projectile dispersed violently across the target surface. 

It was clearly a sniper weapon, but calling it merely a sniper rifle understated the design. It was a precision armor-killer. 

He looked through the shattered glass doors leading onto the annex balcony. Outside, the communications guard lay beside the railing—or most of him did. The body had fallen backward across the balcony floor, with everything above the collar simply gone. The neck seal had melted into the upper armor, its edges fused and blackened, while blue blood had sprayed across the floor and dried in a broad fan against the rear wall. Microscopic fragments of helmet ceramic glittered through the residue. 

Desolas crouched beside the corpse and studied the damage. The shot had crossed the balcony’s kinetic screen, defeated the guard’s personal barrier, then dispersed across the throat and head with enough thermal energy to vaporize tissue and melt armor. There had been no correction shot and no wasted movement. One discharge had been sufficient. 

Looking back through the shattered glass toward the terminal chamber, he saw that the dead officer lay almost directly behind the guard’s former position. The two targets had occupied nearly the same firing line. The sniper had killed the balcony guard first, shifted only slightly, and then fired through the terminal glass at the officer inside. Both shots had crossed nearly three hundred meters of smoke and broken architecture while human assault operators were moving through the annex. 

Overwatch. 

Across the avenue stood the ruined transit control tower. Its upper level had an unobstructed line toward both the balcony and the terminal chamber beyond it. 

Desolas rose. “Preserve the balcony and terminal chamber. I want every projectile trace and impact surface mapped before anything is moved.” 

His aide followed him toward the breach. “General?” 

“The sniper was across the avenue.” 

They crossed beneath the protection of two infantry squads. Smoke drifted between abandoned transports and the collapsed ribs of the maglev guideway. The control tower’s lower entrance had been forced open during the occupation, but the interior remained largely untouched. Dust covered the stairs, dead screens hung from the walls, and emergency lights pulsed weakly beneath layers of soot. 

Desolas climbed to the upper level. 

A section of observation glass had been removed rather than shattered, leaving a narrow opening with a direct line toward the annex balcony. A collapsed support pillar provided concealment from anyone observing from street level, and the dust behind it had been disturbed where someone had lain prone. Marks remained from knees, elbows, and the rear support of a long weapon. 

The sniper had arrived unseen, established the position, fired, and withdrawn without leaving anything obvious behind. 

Then Desolas noticed the floor. 

Beside the support pillar, a scorched crescent interrupted the dust. At its center lay a faint rectangular impression. It was neither ammunition nor a demolition charge. Something dangerously hot had been ejected there, allowed to rest against the floor for several seconds, and then retrieved. 

A second mark lay two meters away. Its shape matched the first, although the scorching was deeper and the dust surrounding the impression had fused into a thin black crust. 

Desolas touched the edge with one talon and considered the likely sequence. Two ejections: the first after the shots that killed the balcony guard and the officer in the terminal chamber, the second sometime later during the engagement. Perhaps two shots per thermal sink before replacement. 

The sniper weapon had a serious heat problem. 

Its operator had collected both spent sinks before withdrawing, which spoke to discipline and training, but heat left memories where hands did not. A faint smile touched Desolas’s mandibles. 

Good. Even nightmares had logistics. 

“Search the entire tower,” he ordered. “Armor particles, fabric fibers, boot pressure, skin residue, blood, weapon lubricant—anything careless enough to remain.” 

His aide glanced toward the empty firing position. “You want the operator identified?” 

“I want the rifle, the operator, and whoever designed both.” Desolas indicated the first scorched imprint. “The weapon appears capable of two shots before an oversized thermal sink must be changed. That limitation is useful only if we understand the discipline behind it.” 

He turned his attention back toward the annex. “Their assault rifle adapts its projectiles to barriers and armor, while their sniper rifle sacrifices endurance for finality. A species that arms infantry with both has either found something remarkable or become something remarkable.” 

He left the words Prothean origin unspoken. 

Every advanced species in the galaxy had climbed stairs built by the Protheans. Humanity would be no different. The humans had simply found a staircase no one else had mapped. 

When Desolas returned to the annex, his route took him past the collapsed stairwell. Another headless body lay among the rubble, bearing the same thermal signature as the communications guard on the balcony. The sniper had reloaded and continued covering the team’s withdrawal after leaving the initial firing position. 

By then, the technical specialists had isolated the Turian intelligence subnode. Microscopic scoring surrounded the interface port, showing that the system had been physically accessed. A foreign intrusion cradle had attached there briefly, adapted itself to Turian architecture, and then been removed. 

A specialized virtual intelligence was possible, but given the humans’ naval behavior, genuine artificial intelligence was more likely. Even so, the machine was neither omnipresent nor unlimited. It had required direct physical contact to penetrate the protected military partition. 

That limitation mattered. 

The senior specialist approached carrying a slate a little too tightly. “General, the surveillance archive is gone. Cameras, motion logs, internal sensors, even the EMP discharge record. The subnode claims the damage resulted from an artillery-induced power interruption.” 

Desolas looked around the burned room. “You do not believe it.” 

“No. The false faults agree too perfectly. Nothing was merely erased. The system was rewritten around a consistent explanation.” 

“Can you recover anything?” 

“Fragments. The EMP interrupted the denial package before it completed every secondary wipe.” 

“Then show me what survives before your people improve it into uselessness.” 

The projection stuttered to life. 

A medium-armored figure entered through the west wall, moving with controlled economy that immediately suggested command. A second followed in similar armor, faster through the room but slightly less efficient around corners. Behind them came a heavier figure who sealed the breach and anchored the rear. 

Then a white streak crossed the terminal chamber from the direction of the transit tower, and the Turian officer vanished inside a bloom of thermal distortion. 

Static consumed the next several seconds. Another surviving fragment showed the stairwell collapsing inward beneath a missile strike, after which the recording vanished completely. 

Desolas watched the sequence three times. 

Between the surviving images and the physical evidence, the team gradually took shape in his mind. Three operators had entered the annex. The commander moved patiently and killed without waste. The younger assault operator adapted quickly to changing barriers and armor, though his movements contained small hesitations absent in the others. The heavy operator used missiles against structure rather than spending them unnecessarily on individual soldiers. The fourth operator had remained in the control tower, patient and precise, firing only when a shot would be decisive. 

Behind all four had been the machine. 

It required direct access, and despite its obvious capabilities, it had apparently avoided unrestricted control of the district network. Whether that restraint reflected technical limitations or command discipline remained unclear. 

Desolas moved to the body trapped beneath a collapsed data rack. The soldier had died from a close-range headshot after the initial fighting. 

At first glance, an execution. 

No. Denial. 

Executions were punishments. This had been preventative. The soldier’s weapon lay beyond his reach, and the blood pattern beneath the rack showed that he had remained conscious for several moments after becoming trapped. Someone had killed him before withdrawal because leaving him alive created a risk. 

The shot angle and grouping suggested the commander rather than the younger assault operator. 

A witness had been removed because he had seen too much. 

“What files were accessed?” Desolas asked. 

The technical specialist stiffened slightly. “Most local cores were destroyed. However, the extraction unit retained partial buffer fragments before the thermite reached the subnode.” 

“Specifics.” 

“Geological survey categories, military exclusion overlays, subsurface radar anomalies, cave topology, and canyon hydrology.” 

“Region?” 

The specialist glanced down at his slate. “The continental western canyon system, approximately one hundred and sixty kilometers from the capital. The records do not identify a precise site.” 

There. 

The realization formed inside Desolas, cold and bright. 

The humans had reacted far too strongly for ordinary geography. They had not come to retake the city, protect civilians, or merely kill occupation officers. They had come to erase a direction. 

A young species had appeared with impossible ships, forbidden artificial intelligence, unfamiliar defensive fields, heavily armored war doctrine, and weapons that transformed civilized concepts into industrial slaughter. Now its elite covert operators were destroying geological archives and killing anyone who stood between them and one particular region. 

They had found something. 

Perhaps a Prothean cache. Perhaps a beacon. 

The possibility sent a shiver through him before discipline forced it down. Whatever lay there, the humans had concealed it behind falsified geology, closed military records, and deliberate bureaucratic absence. Now their ghosts were killing to keep the region buried. 

A whisper moved behind Desolas’s thoughts, carrying pressure, approval, and the impression of a path opening beneath black stone. He did not need it; the evidence was sufficient on its own. 

Still, the whisper remained, soft and patient and pleased. 

His aide watched him carefully. “General, what conclusion should I give the occupation staff?” 

“Tell them the humans are not defending the city. They are defending a secret, and our survey searches threatened it.” 

“Will we identify the canyon region on the general network?” 

“No.” 

Desolas turned toward the gathered officers. “Compartmentalize everything recovered here: projectile traces, thermal marks, interface damage, tool impressions, surveillance fragments. No reference to the western canyon system leaves this room without my authorization.” 

The technical specialist saluted. “And the archive teams?” 

“Issue portable EMP support, harden every subnode against physical intrusion, rotate sentries irregularly, and require manual confirmation for all movement orders.” 

“Should we enlarge the search teams?” 

“Double the sentries, but keep the teams mobile. More bodies only give these humans more targets.” 

The specialist hesitated. “What reason do we announce?” 

“None. If they are watching, let them wonder whether we discovered their objective or merely learned their methods.” 

His aide saluted. 

Desolas looked once more across the burned terminal chamber. He had come to Shanxi expecting resistance and had found confirmation instead. The humans had concealed something within the western canyon system, hidden from most of their colonial command structure and protected by four elite covert operators supported by an artificial intelligence. 

The whisper stirred behind his thoughts again, almost forming a word, but he ignored it. 

The technical specialist spoke carefully. “Captain Victus requests confirmation that the city search detachments will continue. He recommends recalling several units to Firebase Vanguard.” 

Victus saw too much and asked questions too precisely. That made him useful, but potentially dangerous if handled poorly. 

“Tell him the searches continue. He may reorganize the forces already committed to the fortress, but the occupation detachments remain in New Taiyuan.” 

“He will argue that Vanguard is the immediate military threat.” 

“He would be correct,” Desolas said. “The firebase can kill soldiers by the hundred. What lies somewhere within that canyon system may alter the future of the Hierarchy.” 

The specialist hesitated again. “We do not know that anything lies there.” 

“We know the humans created an elaborate absence around the region and sent their best covert soldiers when we approached it. That is enough to continue.” 

Desolas looked west, toward the horizon beyond the smoke and ruined towers. 

In the distance, Firebase Vanguard continued to thunder. Human guns hammered the plain while Turian artillery answered. Ships burned in memory above them, and soldiers died by the hundreds for trenches, ridges, bunkers, and roads. 

That was the visible war, important and necessary, but Desolas no longer believed it would decide the future. 

Somewhere within the western canyon system lay the reason the humans had sent ghosts instead of soldiers. 

He found the thought pleasing. At last, something worthy had stepped out of the shadows. 

Desolas continued looking west, where smoke concealed both the horizon and the canyons beyond it. 

“Run, then,” he said softly. 

His aide did not hear him. Perhaps no one did. 

Perhaps something did. 

Desolas smiled. 

“I will follow.” 

A/N: In Chapter 14, I introduce a brand-new AGI to the mix, and frankly, it’s time to bust the ultimate sci-fi myth: the omnipotent "god-hack" AI. If AGIs could magically rewrite firewalls from across the room, Forerunner Ancillas like 343 Guilty Spark would have wiped the floor with Master Chief before Halo 1’s credits even rolled. Instead, Chief spent half his time physically yanking Cortana’s data crystal chip out of his helmet to shove it into terminal consoles. Why? Because isolated networks require a direct, physical connection to brute-force. My own AGI, Glitch, operates on those exact same blue-collar rules; if he wants to hijack a secure subnode, he has to be physically plugged in. No wireless miracles here. 

Then there’s the dreaded EMP. People treat electromagnetism like instant AI kryptonite, but the reality—which I’ve lovingly borrowed from Halo lore—is much more hardware-dependent. Glitch’s consciousness is software encoded onto a physical data crystal matrix. If he's nestled inside a heavily shielded chassis, he can ride out a localized blast just fine. But if an EMP hits an unshielded device or a network he is actively tethered to? Boom. His data matrix gets corrupted, temporarily knocking him offline or, if the pulse is strong enough, permanently wiping him into expensive silicon scrap. 

So no, AGIs in my story are not an automatic win button. They are brilliant, temperamental, and highly susceptible to a good, old-fashioned power surge. 

Anyway, chapter 15 will be posted on August 21th. Thank you all for your supported for this story and myself. Hope you all wonderful people the best.   

P/S: Oh, before i forgot, here is the image for the M55 - Stalker.