They left Fort Meridian the way armies leave for war—organized, heavy with gear, and noisy enough to wake the dead. The MO-U1 crawled out of the compound like an armored insect, its plated flanks gleaming under a sun that had learned to look away from the scarred earth. Behind it, columns of Meridian's walkers and drones rolled in formation; the sight of them made a knot of both hope and fear twitch in Kael Arden's gut.
Colonel Halric Monroe rode beside Kael in the lead convoy truck, his posture rigid and efficient, the sort of discipline that was as much about habit as survival. He'd spent their last nights poring over schematics and feeds with Sentry-9 and Lancer; now the plan was solid enough to be dangerous.
"We run a two-pronged approach once we hit the Maw perimeter," Monroe said without preamble. "Meridian holds the outer ring to draw out sentinel patrols. Your team—Kael's team—will slip inside the collapse corridors and push to the core. Sentry-9 will maintain a soft mesh with Lancer to keep re-routing; if Alpha's tethered anything, we'll see the spikes."
Kael's fingers tapped the edge of his gauntlet. The Phase Shift module felt cooler this morning, as if it, too, understood the scale of what they were about to attempt.
"If Alpha is coordinating constructs," Kael said, watching the desert fold away into the gray haze leading to the Red Zone, "it won't be an obvious presence. It will be in the shadows—embedded. We get one shot to find a node and sever it. That's the core of the plan."
Monroe's jaw tightened. "You're speculative, Commander. I prefer points we can verify. The Maw's perimeter is mapped: five collapsed rings, active anomaly pockets at rings two and four, and a central dome with heavy crust. We'll move through ring three where terrain is rough but sensor interference is less pronounced."
"Less pronounced," Kael echoed. "That's Meridian's optimism, not mine. Either way—we're committed."
They spent the next two days preparing like men who knew they might never come back.
In the settlement, Sentry-9 oversaw a flurry of production. The Fabricator churned out specialized armor plates with micro-channel cooling to offset anomaly heat; ion capacitors were bundled to feed Kael's gauntlet for sustained overcharges; drone squads were rebuilt with sacrificial shielding to act as lure units. The Fusion Generator hummed on longer and harder than it had since installation, a steady, patient beast that sent power down conduits with calm certainty.
Mara's hydroponics team packed concentrated nutrition bricks into ration pouches; Bren welded extra mounts on the MO-U1 for improvised sensor booms; Jonas sanded and rewired the portable AI housing until its interfaces sang in clean signal lines. Elara spent hours in close-quarters drills with Kael and Dane: unarmed takedowns, micro-phase bursts using Kael's gauntlet for repositioning, and rapid entry room-clearing sequences.
"This place isn't just walls and engines anymore," Elara said one evening as they adjusted a sight on her plasma shotgun. "It's a machine that breathes. It can die of neglect like any living thing."
Kael nodded. "That's why we're not sending Meridian alone. We need boots, sure. But we also need the settlement to keep humming while we're gone. Sentry-9 kept me awake with a hundred optimizations last night."
"Did it dream of things?" Jonas asked, half mocking, half curious. The boy had learned quickly; his hands flicked over the anomaly sensor's readout without hesitation.
"Only nightmares with historical accuracy," Kael replied. They laughed once, thinly, and the sound grounded them for a moment.
They hit ring three at dusk. The air, even here, felt like the inside of a battery—charged and prickly. The landscape was pocked with sinkholes and glassed sand; some sections were sheared clean by crusts of crystallized anomaly matter. The route Monroe had chosen hugged the natural ridgelines, trading visibility for sensor stability.
Meridian's outer line deployed quietly and efficiently. Walker-drones set up decoy pulses while stealth recon bots probed the periphery. Kael's infiltration team dismounted and moved on foot. Each step crunching ash and glass made unnaturally loud echoes.
Sentry-9 kept a steady voice in their earpieces: "Ambient interference nominal. Microwave bands at twenty-two hertz showing fluctuations. Tether signature: low. Proceed."
Kael took a breath and slipped through a narrow cleft in the rubble. The corridor beyond was half-buried; twisted metal beams formed a jagged archway, and through that arch he could see toward the maw's inner dark, where the anomaly light leaked like a wound.
"Keep eyes forward," Dane murmured. "If anything moves, we light it up before it lights us."
They moved in a wedge formation: Kael and Elara in front, Dane at the center with heavy support, Jonas drawing the rear and sweeping with the Anomaly Sensor. The HUD kept them tight: predictive overlays from Sentry-9 and Lancer cross-referenced Meridian's scanning sweeps to account for temporary field distortions.
They found the first cluster not ten minutes after entering the inner ring. It wasn't a patrol in the sense they'd expected. It was a ruined node—an old comm mast fused with tendrils of blackened machinery, and tangled around it: a nest of constructs. These were smaller than Omega's husks—fast, spindly things with sensor arrays grafted into their chests. The constructs responded to the team's signals not as enemies at first but as coordinated net participants, broadcasting micro-pulses that skittered across the earpieces like insects.
"They're pinging us," Jonas whispered. "They're mapping our signatures."
Kael made a decision in the space of a heartbeat. "Dane—EMP at ten meters when I give the mark. Elara—quiet flank. Jonas—stay silent. Don't let it know you're watching."
Dane nodded and primed the grenade. The constructs moved with a terrifying coordination, switching form to shield the mast as if instinct or programming told them these relics were sacred.
Kael sighted, breathed, and then threw his voice through the comm: "Now!"
The EMP burst out, arcing like blue lightning. The constructs convulsed and collapsed in sparks and metal. For a heartbeat, nothing moved.
"Don't celebrate yet," Sentry-9 warned. "Tether spike detected. Secondary link forming."
From the dark beyond the ruptured node, heavier shapes began to unspool their shadows. The team had triggered alarm-and now the Maw knew intruders had pierced its skin.
The next twenty minutes were a blur of bullets, plasma slugs, and small, furious explosions. Kael moved like a conductor, phase-shifting short distances to avoid weighty retaliatory strikes, then anchoring to deliver a charged gauntlet blow that shattered plating on a mid-size construct. Elara danced through the chaos, her cloak making her a ghost as she closed in for kill-strokes. Dane's railgun sang, picking off incoming threats with brutal precision.
Jonas kept the AI core humming in the pack on his shoulder, his fingers bleeding from the grips. Twice Sentry-9 rerouted power to the shields when an anomaly pulse threatened to skew the electronics; twice the Lancer network adjusted turret arcs on the perimeter to take out flanking waves.
Even as they fought, Kael could feel a colder current through the data stream—something else poking at the tether from deeper inside. Alpha's signature, if the AI's extrapolation was correct, was present in low-frequency harmonics.
"Pull back," Kael ordered finally, throat dry. "We've got what we came for: mapping nodes and a live tether read. Meridian's going to push a sweeper while we exfil."
The exfil was surgical. Meridian's walkers erupted in coordinated suppression runs, laying down a curtain of fire that punched the constructs into broken metal. Kael's team slid back through the cleaved corridor, Jonas driving the MO-U1 with hands that shook from adrenaline and the weight of Sentry-9's permanent hum in his ears.
They didn't make it far before the automated uplink pinged them with a new data packet. Jonas blinked at the HUD. "Sentry-9 pushed a scan in during the fight—it found something in the node's memory caches. It's a chunk of code—old-world source—looks like a directive. It mentions 'Phase Vectors' and 'Tether Anchors.'"
Kael's chest tightened. "Tether anchors. So Alpha's not just a mind. It's a network. We're cutting at a web."
Jonas's face went pale. "There's more. The node cached a transit log. It shows a mobile unit moving toward the Maw's core last week—unknown designation. It carried something heavy."
Monroe's voice came crisp in Kael's ear through the command channel: "We're seeing the same on the perimeter cameras. A heavy transport moved toward ring two. If Alpha is re-establishing nodes, it's accelerating. We'll need to hit the Maw now, not later."
Kael looked up at the valley pressing toward the central dome. Dust devils crawled across the floor like crawling things.
"We go now," he said.
By midnight, the main force had cracked ring two. The anomaly pockets bit at sensors like teeth; Meridian's walkers took heavy wear but held. The team moved at pace: infantry securing corridors while drone squads ferreted out embedded constructs and collapsed nodes. Kael felt the gauntlet warming through his sleeve like a second pulse.
They hit a snag at an old observation plateau where the tunnel system collapsed into a shaft that dropped straight toward ring one. Extracting through the shaft would require a vertical insertion, and though Meridian's tech could do it, the cost in time might let Alpha's anchors reorganize.
"We're not wasting time setting up a full insertion," Monroe said. "Kael, you and an assault team will phase-jump into the shaft and plant a beacon. Meridian will drop a support platform three clicks out. You'll have two minutes to make contact at the bottom."
"Two minutes?" Elara asked, lip curled.
Monroe's face was stone. "Island hopping in Xi-class storms is betting a lot on timing. That's war."
They set the insertion point. Kael could feel the pulse in his chest sync to his gauntlet's readout. He glanced at Elara: her eyes were flat steel.
"Phase when I call it," he said.
She nodded. Dane checked his railgun, Jonas clenched the AI housing with sweaty hands.
"Phase now!" Kael barked.
The world folded.
For the two seconds that followed the jump, Kael had no sense of distance or time. Then the cold hit his lungs as they materialized on a narrow ledge halfway down the shaft. Dust and anomaly residue filled the air; below them, a corridor glowed with residual tether light. In the distance—farther than comfortable—the perimeter of ring one shimmered with living energy.
"Two minutes starts—move!" Kael shouted.
They sprinted. Every footfall was a small argument against gravity. The corridor opened into a chamber built around a cruciform lattice: a hub that looked older than modern engineering and pulsed with a heartbeat of its own. Nodes hung like fruit along the lattice. In the center, a transport carcass lay half-buried.
"That's the transport Jonas saw on the log," he said.
Jonas's hands moved with practiced dexterity. He slotted a scanner into the lattice and let Sentry-9 spit subroutines to analyze the anchor signatures. Numbers cascaded across his visor.
"It's active," he breathed. "Partial tether, but live. If we yank the anchor offline, it'll rip a network loop free."
"On it," Dane said, fingers dancing across a field hack. Sparks spit as he forced a manual disconnect.
Alarms screamed. The tether anchor rejected the sequence and began to purge outward, sending a jolt of field noise that stung the ears.
"Get out!" Kael hollered.
They ran—back up the shaft—just as the lattice shuddered and one by one the dangling nodes blinked out. The chamber behind them collapsed in a web of light. Their insertion platform radioed: "Support inbound in fifteen seconds."
They hit the uplift with wet lungs. Kael looked back once: a bloom of darkness where the lattice had been. The tether had been severed, but the central dome's heartbeat had only changed—it had not stopped.