The Long War - Chapter 14 Rewrite (Patreon)

A/N: I rewrite most of chapter 14 since the fix version still rather weak and one thing led to another I spend the next few day rewrite chapter 11 - 13 as well. Check Chapter 12 - Re-rewrite, Chapter 11 - Re-rewrite and Chapter 13 - Rewrite to see those change. Hope you like it. and Please sent feedback, I live for them.

Changes from the Original Chapter 14: 

Add captured Turian omni-tool 

Turian cyber-defense changes from generic “hardened and isolated” security into a defined compartmentalized architecture. Keep up from chapter 13. Glitch and Aria can defeat encryption given enough opportunity, but they cannot attack systems when no electronic route exists. Direct physical access becomes necessary rather than merely convenient. 

Glitch loses the original ability to casually seize the local Turian network. The original explicitly says he could reroute patrols and seize the local network if Ryder removed his restrictions. The revision instead has him warn that broad control is unreliable because Turian doctrine will isolate infected segments. Fit with Turian doctrine above.  

Sierra discovers that Turian anti-synthetic doctrine predates first contact. The captured omni-tool contains procedures for severing synchronization, isolating fire control, invalidating remote authority and demanding physical confirmation. This explains Kyrus's Chapter 12 response as established Hierarchy doctrine rather than improvisation. 

Cherry's Chapter 12 intelligence feed is now explicitly part of Sierra's linguistic capability. Glitch has Cherry's Turian primer and surrender traffic, alongside occupation speech and the omni-tool lexicon. The original did not integrate the Chapter 12 surrender data this clearly. 

Williams and Aria's knowledge boundaries are formalized. They know Sierra's operating area and enough to prevent friendly interference, while the purpose of the Annex operation, Canyon Zone 7-A and Glitch's black role remain compartmented. Both discover Glitch only after Sierra is already moving. 

The EMP mechanics are substantially rewritten. The original temporarily disrupts the implants and makes Anderson's armor/body synchronization fail. The revision keeps the hardened suit, local neural control and mechanical weapon functions alive while destroying the shared tactical layer and damaging Glitch because his core is physically exposed. 

Ryder's treatment of Anderson after the witness killing changes significantly. The revision removes the lecture. Ryder handles the immediate security problem and leaves Anderson to process it himself. 

Desolas receives much less surviving surveillance intelligence. EMP damage much of electronic evident. His deduction now feel less like omnipresence.  

Remove section mention Victus entirely.

New Taiyuan, Shanxi, Iota Persei System,  

September 11th, 2149CE - Systems Alliance Calendar 

David Anderson  

New Taiyuan was not silent. From far enough underground, the city only pretended to be. 

Above the maintenance tunnel, electrical fires worked through sealed apartment blocks and fuel burned somewhere near the utility district. Smoke breathed through transit shafts. Far to the west, Firebase Vanguard kept firing, each heavy report rolling under the city before Turian artillery answered from the plain. 

David Anderson had spent enough years around drop pods and warships to measure danger by sound. Atmospheric entry had a scream all its own. Hulls under fire groaned through the deck before damage alarms caught up. Men trying not to panic made small noises inside helmets and usually believed nobody heard them. 

New Taiyuan sounded different. The occupation was happening above his head, while Sierra prepared another fight underneath it. 

Susan Reeds' scope feed opened behind his left eye. 

Three hundred meters ahead, across an avenue blocked by overturned transports and a collapsed maglev guideway, the Shanxi Colonial Survey Annex sat under Turian guard. Susan watched from the upper level of a ruined transit-control tower, her stealth hardsuit almost lost against broken concrete. The M-112 Cascade rested against her shoulder. 

Through the shared feed Anderson saw eight armored figures, weapon arcs and Glitch's thin green-white annotations. The AGI had already tagged likely ranks and movement patterns. 

'Eight on site,' Susan sent. 'Two officers, three infantry, two techs, one balcony guard. Balcony guard keeps checkin' the same rifle. Nervous bloke, or he's very attached to it.' 

Her voice never touched the tunnel air. The neuro-link carried it directly. 

Anderson still disliked that part. 

N6 neural integration let Sierra work their armor without hands, share sight pictures and biometrics, and pass thought-speech faster than ordinary radio. It was heavily shielded military hardware, isolated wherever possible and expensive enough that Anderson had once been told a surgeon and a security lawyer would arrive in whichever order frightened him more if he discussed it outside compartment. 

The link itself was hardened against EMP. Sierra's armor had been built by people who assumed somebody, eventually, would try to turn electronics into dead weight. The team-to-team mesh was another matter. Jam it hard enough, damage the routing AGI, or knock Glitch out of the loop and they would still have their suits, their weapons and local neural control, but the shared layer could go dark. 

Anderson had ridden atmosphere in a coffin-shaped drop pod and called that sensible. Now a classified AGI helped manage traffic through his nervous system. Some days promotion felt like a practical joke with paperwork. 

Lucas Ferreira waited two levels below near a submerged service ramp, covering Sierra's rear in the heaviest armor of the team. Demolition charges sat along his thighs, and an M-56 Hydra rested against one shoulder. 

'Balcony guard touched the rifle again,' Lucas said. 'Nervous.' 

'Agreed,' Anderson replied. 

A pause. 

'Goliath would've made me feel safer.' 

Anderson closed his eyes for half a second. 'The Hydra is the right weapon.' 

'Didn't say it wasn't.' 

Susan's sight barely shifted. 'Can the pair of you mourn the oversized rifle later? I've got a shot to hold.' 

Beside Anderson, Commander Alec Ryder stood in the maintenance tunnel with his M-4 Falchion low across his chest. Early thirties, medium hardsuit, still enough that people sometimes mistook the absence of movement for relaxation. 

Anderson had learned the difference well enough to know his commander was not relaxed. 

Alec had a captured alien's miniature computer—an omni-tool it was called— open over his left wrist. The device had come off the first patrol Sierra ambushed after the occupation began. Anderson kept comparing it to his own armor computer stripped out of the suit and rebuilt as a field notebook: local processing, authentication, tactical traffic, all familiar jobs, except the Turians expected to work through a wrist projection instead of a visor and neural interface. Alien glyphs moved across the display while human annotations crawled beneath them. 

Glitch had been enjoying himself. His physical core sat in a recessed armored socket along the left side of Alec's helmet, a half-palm data crystal with three green cores under transparent shielding. In the shared neural space, the AGI chose a less reassuring appearance, corrupted geometry and almost-human faces assembling and breaking apart before anyone could get comfortable with them. 

Cherry made people comfortable when she wanted to. Aria had considerably more patience with them. Glitch had once described both qualities as inefficient concessions to mammalian morale. 

'...recovered tool authentication remains valid,' Glitch said. 'Thirty-one minutes since the last passive challenge. Their patrol network considers this device attached to a living Turian who is having an unusually quiet shift.' 

Anderson looked at Alec's wrist. 'How long before it notices the owner is dead?' 

'Unknown. Their local discipline is excellent. The discrepancy may be noticed in the next identity challenge, or it may be noticed the moment another system compares the wrong set of records.' 

'That’s not much of an answer.' 

'It is the most precise answer currently available.' 

Anderson had never disliked Glitch for being an AGI. Alliance soldiers worked beside artificial intelligences every day, and most treated them as naturally as they treated any other part of the military. Glitch was simply difficult in the deliberate way certain surgeons were difficult: competent enough to survive complaints, fully aware of it, and just curious enough to see whether anyone would bother making one. 

Anderson had once asked whose neural matrix Glitch had been grown from. Alec had looked at him for three seconds and gave him a flat answer: 'Don't.' 

Anderson stopped asking after that. 

Susan tightened the scope on the annex interior. 'They're pulling another batch. Officer at the portable node, one tech on the annex terminal. Second officer is checking the translated index. Same search pattern.' 

The annex terminal belonged to Shanxi. The intelligence subnode beside it did not. The Turians had brought their own machine, connected it physically to the colonial archive, and were pulling human files into a system they trusted enough to translate, catalogue and pass onward. 

That caution made sense. Whiteout had already gutted large parts of Shanxi's network. Whatever survived on the annex machines was incomplete, and the occupiers treated every human computer as if it might bite them. 

Glitch enlarged the captured omni-tool's passive traffic. 'I can read what the subnode sends to authenticated personal devices. I cannot reach the subnode itself from here.' 

Lucas asked, 'Air gap?' 

'At the sensitive layer, yes,' Glitch replied immediately. 'The surrounding network is compartmentalized: local control, narrow authenticated bridges, physical partitions around protected functions. Their encryption would slow me. The missing route stops me.' 

Anderson remembered Cherry's after-action summary from orbit. 'After what Cherry did to their fleet net, I can't blame them.' 

'You are assuming the response began after Cherry.' 

Anderson frowned. 'Didn't it?' 

'No. The recovered omni-tool contains pre-contact procedures for synthetic intrusion: sever synchronization, isolate local fire control, invalidate remote authority, require physical confirmation. Their fleet executed an existing doctrine. They have encountered hostile synthetic systems before, or they have feared them long enough to prepare seriously.' 

Alec's eyes stayed on the omni-tool. 'Confidence?' 

'Ninety-four percent that the procedure predates first contact with humanity. Sixty-eight percent that it derives from historical combat rather than simulation. Current mission relevance: negligible.' 

Anderson had heard doctrine described that way before. Procedures this specific usually came from an incident somebody wanted remembered. 

Susan shifted her scope a fraction. 'And you're fluent now, are you?' 

'In modern Turian military standard, yes.' 

'Yesterday you were complainin' about verb endings.' 

'Yesterday I had twelve minutes of corrupted salvage audio. Since then I have Cherry's primer, the surrender traffic, nine hours of patrol speech and an intact omni-tool lexicon. Their military menus are also labeled with admirable consistency. Learning occurred.' 

Lucas said, 'He means yes.' 

'I answered yes first.' 

Alec closed one pane of the captured device. 'What are they pulling?' 

Glitch answered without delay. 'Geological surveys. Early landing records. Military exclusion overlays that survived Whiteout. Pre-colonial radar anomalies, cave topology and hydrology. The node is translating human records before exporting summaries to occupation intelligence.' 

Another tag appeared at the edge of Anderson’s vision. 

CANYON ZONE 7-A. 

For several seconds, the link carried nothing except sensor traffic. 

Officially, Sierra had come to Shanxi for an N-program training-ground survey. The canyon country made the cover plausible enough: mesas, caves, broken terrain, long stretches of denied communications, all the conditions a classified team might reasonably want to test.  

General Williams had received the sealed operational notice, Sierra’s operating block, engagement window, and extraction corridor because under martial law, moving through his battlespace without at least that much coordination would have been an efficient way to disappear beneath friendly artillery. 

He had not been told that Canyon Zone 7-A was connected to it. 

A hundred and sixty kilometers from New Taiyuan, inside the continent’s largest canyon system, a restricted cave complex sat behind falsified geology, dead-end survey records, and military closure tags. Shanxi’s command structure did not know what lay inside it. Before first contact, that secrecy had been considered necessary because nobody wanted Shanxi to become another Asteria, another site where the wrong discovery escaped containment before anyone understood what they were dealing with. 

Now an alien army occupied the colony's only city and was systematically pulling geological surveys, early landing records, radar anomalies, and cave maps into its intelligence system. 

The old precautions had not become unnecessary. They had become considerably more dangerous to maintain. 

General Williams still did not know. Aria had noticed Glitch before Sierra formally identified him to her; the moment an unknown intelligence began moving inside her network, she isolated the local traffic, diverted emergency crews away from the operating block, and started containing the intrusion while she verified what had entered her systems. Only after Glitch’s identity and Sierra’s authority were confirmed did she relax from active containment into reluctant cooperation. 

Williams had been less diplomatic. He had called the omission reckless, unacceptable, and 'exactly the sort of classified bullshit that gets good soldiers killed.' 

Anderson disliked that part more than he wanted to admit. Adam Williams was a commander he respected, and asking a man to defend a colony while deliberately withholding something that might change how he understood the battlefield sat badly with him.  

Anderson understood compartmentalization. He understood why knowledge of the annex had been kept narrow before the invasion and why opening it now could make the situation worse rather than better. 

Understanding the reason did not make the omission feel clean. 

'The general remains dissatisfied with my presence?' Glitch asked. 

Anderson remembered Williams staring at Alec after learning what had already been riding inside Sierra’s network.  

'He was unhappy that you were operating before he knew you existed,' Lucas said. 

Anderson thought that qualified as an understatement. 

'I was compartmented.' 

'He knows.' 

'Then his irritation is informationally resolved.' 

Susan made a faint sound across the link. 'You should tell him that yourself, mate.' 

'I have no desire to decrease mission efficiency.' 

Anderson almost smiled. Aria had made her own position clearer over a private channel that Glitch later summarized as territorial hostility disproportionate to technical cause, which Anderson suspected meant she had threatened him politely. The thought lasted only a moment before he returned his attention to the shared traffic. 

'How close are they?' 

'To the access route? Insufficient data. To recognizing deliberate concealment? Close.' Glitch highlighted repeated query categories. 'They have noticed that unrelated records fail in the same geographic direction. That is inefficiently obvious once somebody looks for the absence itself.' 

Susan asked, 'Can you tell where these queries are coming from?' 

'Not from the omni-tool. It receives translated summaries after the node processes them. Command authority is upstream of the partition.' 

Alec lifted his gaze from the captured device. 'Direct access?' 

'Required.' 

'Risk?' 

Glitch answered faster than Anderson expected. 'High. The node is physically isolated, and their anti-synthetic procedures possibly assume direct intrusion is possible. I can enter through the interface cradle once you put me on it. Detection time after crossing the protected partition is unknown.' 

'Remote seizure?' 

'Unavailable without first compromising the node. Even then I recommend against broad network control. Their doctrine is designed to cut infected segments faster than I can guarantee persistence.' 

That was the first time Anderson could remember Glitch voluntarily recommending less access. 

Alec nodded once. 'Trace authority. Copy routing. No lateral movement unless I authorize it.' 

'Acceptable.' 

Anderson looked toward the annex. 'What about the colonial archive?' 

Glitch's geometry tightened around the highlighted records. 'Burn the local copies the Turians have identified, then corrupt whatever extraction history we can reach. Whiteout removed most of the useful network map. These files survived because geology departments are stubborn, badly centralized and apparently immortal.' 

Susan said, 'First kind thing you've said about civil servants.' 

'It was diagnostic.' 

Alec checked each team position, then the annex entrances. His voice stayed slow and exact. 

'General Williams and Aria have our block. They do not have the compartment. That remains unchanged. We take the subnode, identify whoever is directing the canyon search, copy only what we need, then destroy the node and the surviving human records tied to the query. No alarm if we can avoid it.' 

He paused on Anderson. 

'No one leaves with a usable account of what we accessed.' 

Anderson said, 'If somebody surrenders before they see the node?' 

'Secure them if the timetable allows.' 

'And after?' 

Alec's expression did not change. 'Then they are part of the exposure problem.' 

Anderson held his eyes for a moment. 'Understood, sir.' 

Lucas adjusted the Hydra strap. 'Ninety seconds of quiet would be helpful.' 

Susan settled deeper behind the Cascade. 'I'll see what I can arrange.' 

Alec sent the final order. 'Susan, balcony. Hold the second shot for breach unless the interior posture changes.' 

'Righto. I have him.' 

When Susan fired, the Cascade answered with the subdued signature of its oversized dual-field suppressor—nnn-WHUM—tik—a brief rising electromagnetic whine as the accelerator and suppressor fields energized, followed by the strangely soft thump of the projectile leaving the field envelope and a final electrical tick from the rings bleeding off static. There was no gunshot and no supersonic crack racing downrange, only a harsh whisper from a weapon doing far more work than the sound suggested. 

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 just above the throat. 

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

Susan's Cascade hissed as the cooling system dragged heat out of the chamber. 'Guard down. One full-power shot left, then I'm changin' the clip.' 

The Cascade bought that precision with heat. Two full-power shots filled the oversized sink; after that Susan had to change it. 

Susan shifted to the terminal window. 'Second target lined.' 

'Hold,' Alec replied. 'Officer dies on breach. Before the room understands what's happening.' 

Alec crossed first with Anderson two meters behind him, Falchion raised, while Lucas moved in from the opposite side, his heavier armor still unnervingly quiet. He fixed a shaped cutter to the annex’s service wall, burned a silent oval through the reinforced paneling, and caught the section before it could fall. 

The air inside smelled of 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 stood five meters farther on, half-turned toward the terminal room. Alec fired a short suppressed burst, the rounds hammering the barrier until it collapsed in a flash of blue. The Turian jerked around with a startled curse and brought his rifle up. 

"Sh—!?" 

But Alec had already shifted the Falchion’s firing profile; the next shot was heavier, punching through the center of his chest plate and cutting the curse off halfway. 

Blue blood sprayed across the wall in two thin arcs as the body dropped hard, one leg twitching once against the floor. 

A technician farther inside spun toward the sound, mandibles flaring as a resonant, metallic cry broke from his throat, the translator catching up a fraction later. 

“Attack?! We’re und—!” 

Anderson was already moving. He fired a burst into the technician’s barrier, watched it flare blue, then changed the Falchion’s variable-shave profile through the link before the recoil had fully settled. The next rounds hit heavier, breaking through the weakened field and chest plate in quick succession. Anderson passed him before he finished collapsing, leaving the Turian folded over the server cradle with blue blood bubbling from armor seams and spilling across the glowing alien controls. 

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

'Camera feeds remain blind, Glitch reported. Motion control currently assigns the anomaly to a maintenance fault with eighty-seven percent confidence. Do not reduce that confidence.' 

Alec raised two fingers toward the corridor. 'Terminal chamber. Quiet while it remains useful.' 

They moved without speaking. 

Alec advanced along the left side of the corridor with his shoulder close to the wall, Anderson mirroring him on the opposite side while Lucas held the rear. Susan’s scope feed remained at the edge of Anderson’s vision, tracking movement outside and giving them another set of eyes without adding a voice to the corridor. 

Three Turians remained in the terminal chamber: an officer, a communications specialist, and an infantry guard. Behind them sat the intelligence subnode itself, dark-armored and recessed into the wall, linked to the colonial archive by a thick braid of alien cabling. 

Alec stopped outside the door. 

'Left,' Alec sent to Anderson. 'I have center. Hold for my mark.' 

Lucas set a palm charge against the lock, and at Alec’s signal the mechanism gave a soft click before Alec drove the door inward with his boot. 

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. 

What remained of him struck the floor smoking. 

Susan’s feed flashed a warning. 

THERMAL CLIP EXHAUSTED 

She ejected the glowing oversized sink and reached for a replacement.  

'Changin' clip. Six seconds.' 

Inside the chamber, the infantry guard was still staring at what remained of his commander when he shouted, “Sniper!” and started bringing his rifle up. Anderson fired first, a short burst shattering the barrier before the heavier follow-up round punched through the helmet and dropped the guard where he stood. 

At the same moment, Alec crossed the room and fired twice into the communications specialist’s knees before the alien could reach his omni-tool. The Turian collapsed screaming and cursing, one hand still clawing at the other trying to open his wrist mount computer, until Alec put a final round through the throat and reduced the cry to a wet gurgle that ended almost immediately. 

Less than five seconds had passed since the door opened. 

Lucas swept in behind them with his weapon steady, checking the corners while Anderson stepped over the dead guard and cleared the space behind the server stack. 

Nothing. 

Susan's scope feed crossed the balcony and the street beyond.  

'Exterior clear. Two patrols, one block east. Ninety seconds if they keep the route. After that I'm guessin'.' 

Lucas kicked the dead officer’s sidearm beyond reach and took the door. For a moment the terminal chamber was quiet except for damaged equipment cooling and the steady drip of Turian blood from the edge of a console. 

Glitch said, 'Interface clear. Insert me.' 

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 for half a second longer than the task required. The chip looked too small to contain something as unpleasant as Glitch. 

Alec opened the intrusion cradle. 'Lucas, door. Anderson, strip portable recorders. Susan, report changes 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 tightened the instant Glitch touched the node. Pressure built behind Anderson's eyes while the AGI crossed from Sierra's isolated mesh into alien hardware. 'Hierarchy confirmed. Local redundancy, strict authority chains, physical partition ahead. Entry is acceptable.' 

'Minimum depth,' Alec ordered. 'Authority and routing. Nothing else without approval.' 

'Acknowledged.' 

The subnode flickered and 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 answered at once. 'Ground-command authority: General Desolas Arterius. Query review interval is eleven minutes. Personal-staff routing. This is not routine delegation.' 

Lucas kept his rifle on the door. 'Alien general's looking for the canyon?' 

'Correction. He is looking for the cause of the administrative void. He does not yet have the site.' 

Alec did not look away from the subnode. ‘Can you recover his movement schedule?’ 

'Movement data is behind the protected partition. Crossing it will trigger additional synthetic-defense checks. Detection probability rises beyond acceptable baseline.' 

Alec considered the answer for less than a second. 'Cross once. No network seizure. On reaction, break contact.' 

'Acknowledged.' 

The green cores flared brighter. The link tightened around Anderson’s senses. 

More information surfaced as compressed meaning. Desolas had personally routed search authority through occupation intelligence, and multiple Turian teams were now pulling survey records from nodes across New Taiyuan, fitting fragments of old colonial geography into a broader search map. The canyon itself remained buried behind false closures and dead-end records, but enough surrounding files converged on the same blank space to make the absence conspicuous. They had not found the door yet. 

They had noticed the wall. 

Suddenly, 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 EMP hit while Glitch's core was outside Alec's armored socket and coupled directly to the node. His connection vanished in a burst of static. Susan's shared feed dropped, Lucas's remote marker disappeared, and Alec's biometrics went with them. Anderson's suit stayed alive behind military-grade hardening; seals, local neural control and weapon power remained. The team mesh was gone. His Falchion lost its smart-link and the HUD washed white before recovering in local mode. 

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. 

With the shared link cut, Sierra fell back on shouted voice and local suit comms as the emergency doors opened. Enemy armor filled the corridor through dust and dead electronics. 

Anderson fired first. The EMP had stripped the patrol’s barriers along with Sierra’s, and his opening burst hit the lead Turian before the alien could return fire. Two rounds punched through the chest plate and a third struck high beneath the helmet, dropping him backward in a spray of blue blood. 

Alec was already moving. The suppressed Falchion was too long and awkward for the range, so he let it hang on its sling and drew the M-27 from his thigh holster as he closed on the second patrolman. One shot shattered the hip joint and folded the Turian sideways; Alec stepped around the falling body and fired again through the side of the skull. The third Turian was still bringing up a shotgun-like weapon when Anderson caught him from the flank and put a burst through the upper chest before he could fire. 

Lucas came through the side access like an armored wall with opinions. Three mass-accelerator rounds struck his chest plate in quick succession, hammering sparks and fragments from the heavy armor without stopping him. He closed the distance, caught the Turian by the throat plating, and drove him hard into the wall before burying his combat knife up beneath the jaw. The blade punched through the throat, and blue blood spilled hot over Lucas’s gauntlet as the alien sagged against the cracked panel. 

“EMP! Link's down!” Anderson shouted. 

Lucas let the dead Turian slide down the wall. “I notice!” 

Alec pointed at the subnode, where the Glitch chip still sat in the cradle while the green cores flickered erratically between intrusion and blackout. Anderson lunged for it, felt the heat through his glove the moment he grabbed it, and ripped it free before shoving it toward Alec, who caught the chip, drove it into the helmet socket, and sealed the armored cover with a twist. 

For two seconds, nothing happened. Then Glitch returned wrong. 

His voice crawled through the broken link in fragments. 

‘—briefly offline—systems damaged—working—’ 

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 mesh in clipped fragments. 'Functional. Thirty-eight percent routing loss. Core temperature above preferred limit.' 

Alec cut in. 'Status.' 

'Denial package active. The Turians know this node was penetrated. Desolas authority chain recovered; movement routing partial. Attribution is sufficient.' 

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. 

'Clip out. Reloadin'.' 

Lucas looked toward the stairwell support then shifted his Hydra forward. 'Permission to take the stairs?' 

Alec checked the supports. 'Inward collapse. Keep it inside.' 

Anderson took cover beside the doorway. 'You said the Hydra was for vehicles.' 

Lucas shouldered the launcher. 'Today it's for architecture.' 

The M-56 Hydra launched a cluster of micro-missiles into the stairwell. They curved through the opening on separate paths before converging against the load-bearing supports behind the landing. 

The shaped detonations struck almost together, folding the concrete landing downward as reinforcement metal screamed and the next section of stairs collapsed onto the Turian assault element beneath it. 

The screams lasted only a few seconds before dust swallowed them. 

Alec said, 'Burn the node.' 

Lucas was already setting charges. 

Anderson moved to the fallen data racks, tore physical storage cores free, and fed them into a thermite sleeve while his gloves dragged dark streaks through the Turian blood covering the floor. 

One of the Turians trapped beneath a collapsed rack moved. Anderson took in the cracked chest plate, the broken mandible hanging loose, the blue blood pulsing from a wound along the alien’s side, and the empty hands resting against the floor. The Turian was still conscious, his eyes fixed on Anderson’s rifle, and that was enough to make the next conclusion unavoidable. A witness. Anderson raised the Falchion, felt his finger tighten against the trigger, and stopped. 

Alec fired before he could decide, one round passing through the Turian’s head as blue blood spread beneath the rack, and Anderson lowered his weapon slowly. 

The mesh had recovered enough for Alec’s status marker to reappear in Anderson’s vision. Alec looked at him once, glanced toward the dead Turian, then holstered his pistol against his thigh and checked the Falchion before turning back toward the charges. 

He left the question there. The prisoner had been conscious, had seen the node, and incoming troops were already forcing their way toward the room, so Alec had closed the exposure before Anderson finished deciding whether he could. 

There would be time to think about it after extraction, when nobody was trying to breach the stairwell. The part Anderson disliked most was how relieved he felt that Alec had made the decision for him. 

Susan's warning cut in. 'Two patrols convergin'. Armored vehicle just turned onto the avenue.' 

Lucas folded the Hydra. 'If the vehicle follows, I'll deal with it.' 

Anderson covered the breach when Alec gave the order. 'Save the missiles unless we need them. We've made enough noise.' 

Lucas checked the remaining load. 'Wasn't planning to.' 

The withdrawal began. 

Sierra left through the wall breach while the charges cooked the annex from the inside. The charges did not produce one spectacular fireball. Thermite worked through server cores while directed bursts shattered storage crystals and collapsed the node housing into slag. 

Susan covered from above. 

Her Cascade whispered once more after her second reload, punching through an advancing Turian's chest. The body hit the pavement in two loose sections held together by torn undersuit webbing. 

She held the next shot. The route below was open, and the Cascade had already spent enough heat for one withdrawal. 

The team disappeared into the maintenance tunnel beneath an overturned tram. Fifty meters down the service access, the M-55 Stalker waited in the darkness, midnight black and low enough to disappear behind civilian service equipment. Angled armor hid a suppressed electric drive, adaptive suspension and wide tires under armored skirts. It had been built for bad ground and jobs that should never appear on a traffic record. 

Lucas opened the rear hatch and the team piled in, Susan entering last to slide the Cascade into its rack with a hiss of coolant while muttering something deeply unkind about thermal management. The hatch sealed behind her, and the Stalker rolled away without headlights, disappearing into the maintenance tunnel like a shadow on 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 a direction and no access route. The annex records are destroyed. A competent investigation will still show 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're preparing to hunt a Turian general before he finds the door.” 

“Preparing,” Alec said. “Locate first but do not point anyone toward the canyon.” 

Susan sealed the Cascade's hot spent clips into a heat-safe container. “He'll learn from this. Next archive team will have more EMP, tighter auth, probably orders to burn anything we breathe on.” 

“Assume it is,” Alec said. “This advantage is gone.” 

Susan leaned back against the hull. “Got his name out of it though.” 

For several seconds, nobody spoke. 

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

Asteria stayed where Anderson put it. So did Canyon Zone 7-A. The wounded Turian was harder to keep out. He could still see the empty hands, then Alec's shot arriving before Anderson had made himself choose. He hated the hesitation. The relief that Alec had chosen first was worse. 

He watched the tunnel swallow itself ahead of the Stalker. 

Above them, New Taiyuan kept burning while the Stalker carried Sierra deeper into the maintenance network. 

New Taiyuan, Shanxi, 314 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 casualty list, the burned node and the reaction company's perimeter said otherwise. 

Desolas stepped through the broken west wall and raised one hand before the officers behind him could follow. “Hold the entrance. No one crosses this room until the evidence is mapped. Put the reaction company around the building. Order outside first; investigation inside.” 

His aide stopped at the edge of the breach. “Their sweep is still incomplete, General. We have not cleared the eastern stairwell or the lower archive level.” 

“Clear outward and hold the exits. If the humans left a rear guard, kill or contain it before it reaches this room. I will not have twenty nervous soldiers trampling evidence because procedure makes them feel useful.” 

The aide inclined his head. “Understood.” 

The squads redistributed without argument. Desolas waited until the room belonged to investigators rather than infantry before moving farther in. 

The room beyond had been burned with deliberate purpose. Thermite had eaten through the server racks while directed charges broke storage cores and collapsed the node housing. Whatever remained of the field equipment had fused into blackened lumps among cracked storage cores and melted cabling. 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, a private killed close to the breach. Two smaller impacts marked the side of the chest plate in a tight grouping, while a third, noticeably larger wound had punched through the center mass. The shooter had come through the western wall, opened with the lighter profile before the private fully registered the breach, then switched ammunition weight and finished him as he turned. 

The second corpse belonged to a technician whose armor showed the same sequence in compressed form: a single larger penetration through the chest where the heavy round had followed. 

His aide remained near the breach but leaned slightly to study the damage. “The human variable-ammunition weapon?” 

“Most likely.” 

Desolas touched one talon to the edge of the ruined plate without disturbing it. 

The firing patterns were too similar to be coincidence. Different shooters, perhaps, but both had used the same weapon logic: light rounds to strip protection, heavy rounds to penetrate once the barrier failed. More importantly, they had done it with the timing of men trained to make the transition without hesitation. 

That interested him more than the wounds themselves. 

The attack resolved into a sequence as he followed the bodies: a breach from the west, rapid suppression, direct access to the node, then denial and withdrawal. At least three operators had entered. A fourth had covered them from outside. 

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 fluid, perhaps. The resulting friction would have produced tremendous heat, then the projectile dispersed violently across the target surface when hit. 

The weapon had been used as a sniper rifle, though the wound suggested a precision armor-killer designed to end the argument in one shot. 

He looked through the shattered glass window leading onto the annex balcony and thought briefly of the guard who had stood there, exposed enough to see the street and confident enough to believe the barrier made the position defensible. Then Desolas rose, crossed the room, and stepped out onto the 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 punch through 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. One discharge had been sufficient. 

He looked back through the shattered glass toward the terminal chamber. 

The dead officer inside 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 the weapon only slightly, then fired through the terminal glass at the officer inside. 

Desolas’s brow plates drew together. 

The distance from the balcony to the terminal chamber was trivial. A weapon capable of producing this kind of damage should have announced itself to everyone on the floor, even if the first target died before raising an alarm. Yet the two bodies near the western breach told a different story. Both men had been caught turning toward attackers they had only just noticed. 

No warning. No prepared weapons. No sign that they had heard a shot powerful enough to erase a head from the shoulders. Desolas looked again at the fused armor around the balcony guard’s neck. 

That did not fit. 

He left the question unresolved and returned to the geometry of the attack. Whatever the weapon had sounded like, its position was easier to determine. 

Overwatch from across the avenue. 

The ruined transit control tower stood opposite the annex, its upper level commanding 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 back 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 lain here long enough to build a stable position, fired across the avenue, then stripped almost everything portable before withdrawing. 

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 left there, allowed to rest against the floor, and then retrieved. 

A second mark lay a meter 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 studied both impressions. 

Heat sinks. 

Human ejectable thermal sinks, almost certainly. Turian recovery teams had already found the same basic solution on most captured human small arms: absorb the weapon’s waste heat into a removable sink, eject it when saturated, then replace it. The dimensions here were larger than those used by ordinary rifles. 

He 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. 

Whatever the weapon could do to a target, it paid for it in heat. 

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. 

A limitation was useful only after it had been verified. Desolas wanted the intervals, the reload procedure and the operator who had learned to live with both. 

“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. I want the operator alive if that remains practical. After that, I want the design chain that put such a weapon in the human hands.” 

His aide looked down at the scorched marks. “If the two-shot limitation is correct, infantry could exploit the reload interval.” 

“If they know when the operator fired, know the firing position, survive the first shot, and have enough time to reach it before the next sink is installed.” Desolas looked at him. “Do not turn a technical limitation into a comforting tactical assumption.” 

“No, General.” 

“The interval matters. The design logic matters more.” Desolas looked back toward the annex. “Their assault rifle changes projectile behavior to suit the protection in front of it. This weapon trades endurance for extreme penetration. Different mechanisms, same engineering philosophy: adapt the weapon to the problem rather than force every problem through one solution. That kind of technological lineage does not emerge in isolation.” 

He left the words Prothean origin unspoken. 

Every advanced Citadel species had built on Prothean remains somewhere in its ascent. Humanity would not be exempt merely because Citadel civilization had encountered them late. The unanswered question was what they had found, and why they had hidden it. 

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 firing from the tower while the assault team began its withdrawal.  

By then, the technical specialists had isolated the Turian intelligence subnode.  

Very little remained of it.  

Thermite had eaten through most of the core housing, collapsed the internal lattice, and reduced the protected storage stack to fused metal and blackened fragments. The specialists could confirm that the destruction had been deliberate and thorough, but the interface itself was too badly damaged to preserve a useful access history. 

Desolas studied what remained anyway. 

The humans had gone to considerable effort to ensure nobody could determine what they had done inside the node. That alone proved nothing about artificial intelligence. Still, He suspected it involvement. 

Fleet reports, the timing of the attack, the precision of the deception, the speed with which local systems had been manipulated and then erased—none of it amounted to proof, but together they formed a pattern he was unwilling to dismiss.  

For the moment, that pattern would have to do. 

The specialist approached carrying a slate a little too tightly. “General, the local surveillance archive is gone. Internal cameras, motion logs, and records were either destroyed by the EMP or lost when the node burned. We recovered no usable close imagery from inside the annex.” 

Desolas glanced across the scorched terminal chamber. “Can anything be recovered?” 

“Almost nothing from the internal archive. District cameras outside the EMP radius survived in fragments, and occupation intelligence still retains the node’s assigned query manifest and upstream tasking.” 

“Show me the raw recovery.” 

The specialist hesitated. “It has not been cleaned.” 

“That is why I asked for it. Show me what survived before your analysts improve the evidence into a theory.” 

The projection stuttered to life with exterior views rather than the close interior feed Desolas wanted. One camera across the avenue caught three human silhouettes moving through smoke toward the western wall: two armored figures close together and a heavier one hanging slightly behind. Later footage resumed only after the stairwell had collapsed, dust boiling from the damaged structure as the same three figures withdrew toward the service access; a fourth silhouette appeared several seconds later, crossing in from the direction of the transit tower and joining them before all four disappeared below ground. 

Desolas watched each surviving angle twice, then returned his attention to the physical scene. 

The imagery gave him size, spacing, and sequence, little more. Combined with the breach, the bodies, and the firing geometry, it supported a rough reconstruction: three operators had entered the annex while a fourth maintained overwatch from the tower, then abandoned the firing position and joined the withdrawal. A heavy weapon had been used against the stair structure, while the precision weapon had fired sparingly, consistent with the thermal marks upstairs. Beyond that, Desolas refused to let a handful of broken images harden into certainty. 

Direct access had been necessary. The surviving evidence also showed no attempt to seize the district network wholesale. Desolas could not yet tell whether that restraint came from technical limits or command discipline. 

Desolas moved to the body trapped beneath a collapsed data rack. The soldier had died from a close-range headshot after the main exchange, weapon out of reach and hands empty. The sequence fit a denial killing during withdrawal. It did not tell him who had fired only that the team had been unwilling to leave a conscious witness behind. 

“What files were accessed?” Desolas asked. 

The technical specialist stiffened slightly. “The local cores are effectively gone. We have the node's tasking copies from occupation intelligence and a partial outbound query registry preserved upstream.” 

“Give me the categories.” 

“Geological surveys, military exclusion overlays, subsurface radar anomalies and cave topology. Canyon hydrology appears repeatedly in the assigned search package.” 

Desolas’s attention sharpened. “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.” 

The region was finally coherent enough to act on. 

The humans had committed a small specialist team, almost certainly with machine support, to an annex whose useful records pointed west. They had burned the node and the local archive during withdrawal. The surviving evidence could not tell Desolas exactly what they feared losing, but the direction of their effort was clear enough. 

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 equivalent of Blackwatch were destroying geological archives and killing anyone who stood between them and one particular region. 

The western canyon system now deserved priority. 

At the edge of his thoughts, the familiar pressure returned with an image of black stone and depth. Desolas kept his attention on the evidence in front of him. The pressure could wait. 

His aide watched him carefully. 

“What do you want occupation staff told?” 

Desolas turned from the destroyed subnode. “Tell occupation staff only that human covert forces struck an intelligence annex and that security procedures are changing. The conclusion stays here. The Hierarchy gains nothing by advertising where its interest is moving.” 

“Do we circulate the canyon region?” 

“No. Compartmentalize the canyon material under my authority. Projectile traces, thermal marks, interface damage, tool impressions, surviving exterior imagery—everything. No reference to the western canyon system leaves this room without my authorization. Order depends on controlling what subordinates need to know.” 

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

“Change procedure immediately. Expand portable EMP coverage to every archive site that can carry it. Harden physical interfaces, rotate sentries irregularly, and require manual confirmation for unexpected movement orders. Assume the human machine will return looking for the same weakness.” 

“Should I enlarge the security elements?” 

"Double the number of teams, not the size of the teams." 

The specialist paused. “General?” 

“Large groups are easier to observe, slower to move, and give those humans more targets once they choose to attack. I want enough security to make another assault expensive without turning every archive into an infantry company.” 

His aide asked, “What explanation do we give the teams for the changes?” 

“None beyond increased human covert activity.” 

“They may ask whether this site revealed something.” 

“Let them ask. Questions do not compromise the mission; answers do. The humans should see tighter security and nothing else.” 

The aide inclined his head. 

Across the burned terminal chamber, the search finally had a direction strong enough to justify tightening the operation. The western canyon records had been concealed across unrelated systems, and human specialists had struck when Turian queries began joining those absences together. Desolas did not need the site identified yet. He needed the search to keep moving. 

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

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. 

The siege remained necessary; it would secure the colony and break organized resistance. The canyon demanded a different kind of attention, and Desolas intended to give it one. 

The humans had given him a direction by trying to erase one. Desolas kept looking west. 

“Run, then,” he said quietly. 

His aide was already issuing the new security orders and gave no sign he had heard. At the edge of Desolas's thoughts, the familiar pressure remained. 

Desolas's mandibles drew into a small smile. “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. 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 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 unless the EMP is off the chart like a stellar even. 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 out.

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.