Mana blinked against the retinal afterimage of the desert, her helmet’s lenses still etched with the spectral blue of plasma fire and the brilliant violence of the hunt. Now, in the clean white box of the UG interrogation suite, that color felt offensive—a contaminant that refused to be bleached by the LED purity of the ceiling.

She sat in her combat suit, dust-caked and blackened at the shoulder, boots still marked with the iron-oxide residue of a planet where nothing lived. The room was surgically bare: a single white table, two white chairs, an embedded strip of glass running the table’s length that pulsed with the rhythm of her own heartbeat. The air smelt of disinfectant, ozone, and Mana’s own dried sweat, the latter not yet noticed by the man across from her.

The Intel-Officer belonged to the room like another piece of equipment. His coat, medical white with a stripe of cold blue at the collar, fit so perfectly it seemed grown rather than tailored. His face—pale, sharply handsome—had the cultivated blankness of someone who'd learned to hide reactions, but his eyes flicked with precise, predatory interest as they tracked the data splaying across the surface of the table.

Mana sat at rigid attention, spine a ruler from pelvis to helmet. Fox had trained her for these interrogations: never fidget, never blink more than the officer, never volunteer a single word unless prompted. Her suit’s exo-musculature had been set to neutral so that not even a tremor could betray her. Still, exhaustion pressed at the corners of her vision, and a gritty pain itched beneath her left eyelid.

The officer did not address her immediately. He flicked his fingers over the table, and the glass responded with threads of blue and red, a holographic latticework of her own movements rendered in vector lines and frequency graphs. He watched her for exactly twelve seconds before speaking.

The officer's eyes locked on hers. "Command Sergeant Major M-137, Senior Operative Zero-One. Confirm identity for the record."

"CSM-OP Mana, registry M-137, callsign Senior-Op-01," she replied, the formal designation scraping through her throat like sand.

The officer nodded, the motion perfectly symmetrical. “Mission brief: Extraction of relay beacon from site Lancer-Kappa-22. Hostile presence encountered: Jäger-class entities. Confirm?”

She nodded once. Her helmet hissed in the silence.

“Explain,” he said, voice as bright and clean as the light.

Mana recited her report with mechanical precision: "HALO insertion at 0347 hours, LZ coordinates 37.442 by 114.891. Relay beacon located at 0412. First contact with Jäger hostiles at 0429, solo, bearing northeast at 42 degrees. Target Alpha utilized non-standard flanking maneuver, deviation 17% from tactical database. Targets Bravo and Charlie demonstrated coordinated suppression fire, overlapping fields at 30-second intervals. All hostiles neutralized by 0517. Primary objective secured at 0540. Extraction at designated coordinates 37.451 by 114.902." She kept her voice flat, omitting the subsonic frequencies that had vibrated her Core, and the ritualistic markings the last Jäger had traced before she terminated it.

The officer’s gaze slid briefly to the left, toward the mirrored wall. Mana felt, rather than saw, the presence on the other side: a slow exhalation, the shift of fabric, bodies leaning toward glass made invisible by design.

“She witnessed the last one draw a glyph,” a woman’s voice murmured, barely audible to human ears but piped directly into Mana’s helmet by the Core. “How does she not flinch?”  

“None of them do,” said a second, this one baritone and bored. “Not until you make them take the helmet off. They’re used to never being out of the loop. It’s a kind of… insulation.”

The woman: “No. That’s false security. What you’re seeing is permanent work state. They never really come home.”  

Inside the box, the Intel-Officer’s lips parted a fraction. “You believe these behaviors are adaptive? Not pathological?”

“She’s not traumatized,” the woman insisted, watching Mana’s pupillometrics scroll across her own HUD. “She’s operationalizing it. Every memory, every horror—converted to protocol. That’s what makes her viable.”  

“Interesting. So you think this one is a candidate?”

“Insofar as any of them are. She is still running the Controller dialogue in parallel, even though the neural link was severed on entry. She’s cycling through checklists and counterfactuals at a background rate three times baseline. She’s even monitoring us.”  

Mana kept her eyes on the officer’s, but her attention split: one thread for the man, one for the woman.

The officer’s eyes narrowed at her reticence, but he made no comment. Instead, he turned to the data and played the mission back at fifty times speed, kinetic traces flashing through the air above the table.

"Your heart rate jumped 23% at 0431. What happened?" he said, pausing the feed as her heartbeat leapt. “Explain the cause.”

She hesitated. “Adaptation. The Jäger mimicked human tactics. Unexpected.”

“Unexpected,” the officer repeated, as if tasting the word for the first time. “There are also periods of…” he searched for a non-damning word, “…unusual stasis. A gap between standard engagement protocols and execution. Was there malfunction?”

Mana's left index finger tapped twice against her thigh, the motion so slight only the suit's internal sensors would register it. "No," she said, as a bead of sweat crawled down her nape to the micro-ridge at her helmet's base. "I observed behavior inconsistent with prior encounters."

“Such as?” The man’s voice cut, crisp as a scalpel.

She considered her answer. “They attempted communication. Nonverbal.”

“Nonverbal,” he repeated, now less a question than an accusation. “Show me.”

Mana inclined her head to the far corner of the room, where a blank panel disguised a ceiling-height screen. At her signal, the holo-table routed a visual: the moment, captured from her helmet, when the Jäger had crouched by its slain comrade and traced the looping sigil in the dust.

The officer watched. Mana watched him.

For a long time, the only movement was the slow play of video frames and the thrum of her own pulse, rendered as a gentle flicker in the embedded table glass.

He enlarged the footage. Again. Once more. The finger-tap was controlled but the pattern not lost on Mana: three repetitions meant panic.

He turned to her, lips pressed thin. “Are you suggesting the Jäger possess a culture of mourning?”

“I am reporting observed behavior. Analysis is your department, sir.”

The man’s jaw flexed, a flicker of humanity leaking through the cultivated neutrality. “We have seen variants—ritualized postures, even mimicry—but never this.” His fingers pinched the dust sigil, stretched it, compared it against a series of reference glyphs. “This is a motif used by the Kollektiven. Not by the Jäger.”

Mana held her silence. On the table, her heart rate accelerated by four points. The officer’s gaze darted to the biomonitor, then to her eyes, measuring.

He muttered, almost to himself: “They’d sooner die than share protocol. Even at the tactical layer.”

He swept the table clear, then drew up a new set of files: a frequency analysis, spectrum lines running jagged with interference. In the center, a brief spike—nearly invisible.

The man leaned in, intensity burning away the sterile mask. “Explain this,” he said, and replayed the moment from her audio log.

Mana listened: the sound just before the first Jäger charged, a subharmonic vibration like the memory of a siren.

“Did you perceive this at the time?” the officer asked.

She nodded. “Infrasound. Not in the brief.”

The man exhaled, slow and careful. He made a note on his pad, then pressed a button. Above the table, the audio profile twisted into a dense mesh, its harmonics mapped in blood red. He split the mesh, overlaid a reference sample.

The two were almost identical.

Mana watched his composure evaporate. “This is a swarm signal,” he whispered. “Kollektiven. Embedded in Jäger comms.”

Her own pulse thundered in her ears now, but she betrayed nothing. Instead, she glanced at the frequency, replayed the moment in her mind, the static at the edge of her Core. Maybe Fox had known. Maybe Fox had always known, but protected her from the truth.

The officer stared through her, as if looking for the nest of wires and wetware beneath her skin.

“It’s not possible,” he said, at last. “We have decades of conflict to prove they are incompatible.” He ran the sequence again, voice brittle. “Unless…”

He shook his head. “You will remain on standby for further debrief.” His hands trembled as he typed, flagging her file with a pale blue icon and routing it not to his supervisor, but straight to High Directorate. Even Mana, untrained in bureaucratic hierarchies, recognized the color code: P0—existential priority.

He rose. “Wait here. Do not move, do not access external comms, do not—” He stopped himself, breathing slow and even, and left the room.

For a moment, Mana just sat, watching her pulse flatten and slow on the glass. She let her hands fall to the tabletop, flexed her fingers, felt the shudder of fatigue in her bones. She had killed four Jäger, outsmarted a pair of mimics, and survived a surface warzone—but this room, this blank white prison, was the only place she had ever felt truly unsafe.

In the stillness, she wanted to reach for Fox. But the room was shielded, the neural comms pinched shut by jammers built into the walls.

So she waited, a monument in poly-fiber armor, the evidence of her own strangeness spilled like blood across the table.

The relay beacon’s last transmission pulsed in the periphery of her HUD, a ghost she couldn’t blink away.

She knew better than to trust hope, but for one unguarded heartbeat, she let herself imagine Fox breaking the blackout, a secret message smuggled past the shield.

Instead, there was only the hush of conditioned air, the slow tick of her own pulse, and the sense that whatever she’d brought back from the wasteland was already rewriting the world inside these walls.

The voice arrived as a hairline fracture in the glassy hush—not through the link, but around it, a signal that shouldn't exist.

<<Mana? You in there?>>

Mana’s suit readouts showed zero activity on all neural ports. Not even the diagnostic blip that signified background chatter from Fox’s end. The comms were, according to three conflicting overlays, not only dead but excised—severed at the cortical root. Still—

<<Don’t answer. Nod if you read.>>

Mana didn’t move. She kept her face a slab, training her eyes on the inert pulse strip in the table, but her spine rippled cold beneath the flex plates. This was not the Fox she remembered—no warmth, no easy banter, just the hiss of a scalpel through black ice.

<<Good. That’s enough.>>

The words were pure algorithm, a staccato rhythm almost too quick for words. Not sent in packets, not routed through any civilian array Mana recognized. More like a spike forced through the core of her own head. She wanted to ask how, but the fear of external sensors—bugs, bio-monitors, the officer’s eyes watching on silent replay—tied her mouth shut.

<<You did good. They’re rattled. I’m working on a recall, but you’ll probably get a new debrief first. Listen: what you picked up out there, it’s bigger than what Intel will say. You get it, right?>>

Mana flexed her fingers under the table. In another life, she would have said yes, and meant it. Here, the word would land wrong, a risk.