Date: May 2171
Location: ONI Listening Post Telesto-4, Deep Saturn Orbit
The alert was buried beneath seventeen layers of protocol. A minor mining station. A dead relay. One low-band signal burst repeating an encrypted ONI fallback code. Most would've dismissed it as system noise.
But Agent Commander Voss didn't.
Within minutes, the decrypted message was on his secure slate. The source: Caliban Station—a supposedly decommissioned site with a black flag in ONI's deep archives.
"Recon asset confirmed alive. Biological anomalies present. Possible Ceph interaction. Civilian survivor extracted. Beacon compromised. Urgent evac required."
Voss leaned forward.
He opened a private channel to Task Force Helix.
"Hunter Squads Echo-Two and Gamma-Four are greenlit. Stealth insertion protocols. No comms. You land, you verify, you retrieve. Or you burn it."
A pause.
"This doesn't go beyond us. Not yet."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Aboard the UNSC Night Prowler
ETA to Caliban: 7 hours
The ODSTs of Echo-Two sat in silence. Their drop pods were already prepped with special containment rigs, Ceph countermeasures, and signal suppression fields. No names, only call signs. Their mission brief was a few lines long, most of it redacted.
Gamma-Four would land on the station's opposite hemisphere. Two points of insertion. One goal: recover anything salvageable.
A hologram of the station flickered before the lead Hunter: Operator Zev. His armor bore no insignia, only the matte-black finish of a ghost.
"Orders are simple," Zev said. "If you see something that shouldn't be, burn it. If you find survivors, bag 'em. And if you see whatever did this…"
He looked up.
"KILL IT."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Back on Caliban Station
Deck 6 – Environmental Core
Avery dragged herself and Lina into a collapsed storage room. Her wounds were slowing her, her sidearm nearly empty. The beacon was sent—but no one was coming yet.
Until she felt it.
A pulse in the air.
A silent drop.
The familiar hiss of stealth-deployed ODST pods piercing the outer hull.
Avery looked up, lips parting in disbelief.
"Took you long enough."
Outside, the darkness shifted—and something began hunting the hunters.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: May 2171
Location: Caliban Station – Deck 3 Maintenance Ring
The Hunter squads landed like shadows, but they were met by monsters. The infected weren't mindless—they were coordinated. Bodies twisted by Ceph-corrupted biology moved through vents, burst through bulkheads, and swarmed with terrifying speed.
Echo-Two's comms lit up with screams and gunfire within minutes of touchdown.
"Echo-Four is gone—ambush in the recycling shaft!"
"Gamma-Four lost two in the medical ward. These things learn. They're adapting to our weapons—requesting fallback!"
Operator Zev barked orders.
"Push to Deck 6. Priority asset: Avery. We don't leave without her or the girl."
The squad cut through swarms using experimental flame rounds, Ceph-disruptor grenades, and repulsor drones—weapons designed from ONI's black lab counterspecs. It helped, but not enough. One by one, helmets went dark.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Deck 6 – Environmental Core
Avery had been holding the line for nearly half an hour—her hands numb from recoil, her vision dimming from blood loss. Lina clung to her side, clutching a flashlight and an oxygen mask like talismans.
Then, at last, the reinforced door burst open.
Flashbangs. Drones. Pulse rifles. ODST armor.
And Zev.
He didn't speak. He just knelt beside Avery, stabbed a stim into her neck, and nodded to Lina.
"You're lucky," he said. "Most people we find here aren't breathing."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Deck 2 – Auxiliary Shuttle Bay
With the survivors secured, the squads fought their way toward the uplink tower. Echo-Two's tech specialist scrambled to align the station's dish with the stealth ship in orbit.
"Come on, come on—signal handshake failing! We're getting jamming interference from the biomass in the lower decks—!"
A shriek echoed behind them. More infected. Dozens.
Zev turned.
"We hold this corridor. Long enough to connect. No matter what."
One squad remained behind—bodies forming a shield wall around the access terminal. Zev's rifle clicked dry. Then came the flame unit. They burned the walls. The floor. The air.
And finally—
"Connection stabilized. Prowler is online!"
Evac pods launched from the stealth ship, guided by tightbeam. The survivors—Avery, Lina, and five ODSTs—were pulled out in a blur of flame and screaming metal.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Aboard the Night Prowler
Medical Bay
Avery woke, her ribs bandaged, her arm in a sling.
Zev sat nearby, silent. Watching her.
"You weren't supposed to be alive," he said quietly. "But since you are…you're part of this now."
The hatch sealed behind him as he left.
Avery looked down at Lina, sleeping next to her.
And in the shadows of space, Caliban burned.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: May 2171
Location: Caliban Station – Outer Perimeter
The Hargreave-Rasch Biomedical strike team arrived silently.
No dropships. No comms chatter.
Just four black figures in Nanosuit prototypes, dropped from orbital stealth capsules hours before the ONI team ever made landfall.
Their suits were early models—clunky by future standards—but still leagues ahead of anything ONI had. Adaptive armor, limited active camouflage, enhanced strength, integrated biofilters. Built not for war, but for survival.
"Maintain passive observation," whispered operative Theta-One, their squad leader. "ONI runs interference. We slip through."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Deck 4 – Structural Maintenance Spine
The team ghosted through burning halls, bypassing infected clusters and mutilated bodies. The screams of ONI squads echoed below.
Through their visors, the operatives watched the chaos unfold—recording thermal and neural activity for analysis. The Ceph-corruption was mutating, networking...but it wasn't mindless.
Something was coordinating it all.
"Confirmed cerebral signal. Hive intelligence," Theta-Two whispered. "Central node located...Core Reactor Wing."
"Is it human?" another asked.
"Used to be."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Deck 0 – Core Reactor Wing
They moved like ghosts past the ONI push, slipping through vent shafts, maintenance ducts, and disused catwalks. Every corridor was a cathedral of flesh and metal now, overgrown with alien biology.
At the Core Reactor, they found it.
Thane Errol.
Or what was left of him.
His body stood nearly three meters tall, fused to the station's mainframe, tendrils plugged into reactor junctions. His chest pulsed with Ceph-organic light. Eyes burned with flickers of human awareness—and hatred.
Operative Theta-Three's voice trembled over the private channel.
"My god... it's talking to the others. Coordinating them. It's him."
Theta-One stepped forward, deploying a stabilization lance—a prototype device designed to interface with Ceph neural nodes and inject a viral collapse code.
"Primary objective: disrupt hive control. Burn the root."
They crept forward.
But Thane Errol turned.
The monster saw them.
Eyes flared. The walls moved.
Infected howled through the vents.
"Deploying code—NOW!"
The injection spike hissed as Theta-One slammed it into the core of the creature that had once been Thane Errol.
The station shook.
Thane's monstrous form arched back, shrieking in frequencies that overloaded their suit comms. The air around him shimmered—his regenerative tissue faltering, twitching unnaturally. His limbs spasmed. The pulsing network of organic growth throughout the station flickered erratically.
"Code is taking effect," Theta-Two confirmed, his voice harsh and hurried. "He's losing control of the biomass. Infectivity down 90%."
For the first time, the team saw it weaken. Saw fear flicker in what was left of Thane's face.
But even crippled, the monster was still a titan.
"He's not dying," whispered Theta-Four. "He's angry."
Thane roared, lurching forward, tearing apart the reactor chamber in blind fury. The room exploded into violence—metal shrieking, gravity fluxing from the damage.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Theta-Three was the first to fall—caught mid-leap, his nanosuit crushed in a burst of Ceph-grown bone and steel. His vitals went flat instantly.
The others didn't break formation.
They moved with the precision only Hargreave's operatives could manage—energy blades flashing, suit muscles amplifying every motion. They didn't try to kill Thane—they couldn't.
They just had to distract him long enough to escape.
"Route to Sub-Deck 3—clear corridor west," Theta-One barked. "We move on my mark."
Explosions rocked the station. Through their HUDs, a warning blinked in red:
[ONI FIRE COMMAND RECEIVED – CONTINGENCY EXODUS INBOUND]
[STATION DESTRUCTION IN: T-12:00]
The team sprinted down burning corridors—power flickering, gravity buckling. Infected still shambled through the halls, but they were no longer coordinated. The hive mind had gone silent.
"Ceph biomass collapsing. We broke the link," Theta-Two confirmed, bleeding but upright.
Avery and the survivor girl, already extracted by ONI, were en route to orbit. But ONI didn't wait for second chances.
Theta-One keyed their comms to a private Hargreave-Rasch satellite.
"Extraction pod 06—activate. Launch window: 3 minutes."
They leapt through debris, dodged collapsing walls. Ceph-mutated vermin swarmed behind them, their shrieks fading as the core's control dissolved.
In the final seconds, they reached Pod 06—an old Atlas-built escape system. They sealed the hatch and ejected with only ninety seconds to spare.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Orbit – ONI Observation Vessel "Midwatch"
From orbit, ONI operatives watched the station from a cold distance.
"Thermals show massive structural collapse. Biomass destabilized," one analyst said flatly. "No survivors inside."
The ship's main guns fired.
A second later, Caliban Station vanished—reduced to molten fragments drifting into the void.