In the middle of the night, a man ran through the streets.
The token garrison the Grineer had left to control this colony had been slaughtered. The guard posts were burning. The watchtowers had been toppled. The mobile command center had been cracked open like an egg, the victim of a predator creeping into the nest while the parents were away.
They say it had started at Gradivus. The Grineer had attacked Corpus holdings, sweeping away any that opposed them and leaving troops as they went to occupy anything of value. The place he called home was mining gallium. That made it worth seizing. It was a small colony. That meant the commander had only made 'examples' of a handful of his neighbours before ordering them all to get back to work.
The Grineer had spent a week building defences around the mining camp. They held out for an hour before they were all dead.
Backlit by the burning fortifications, the dingy hab modules cast long shadows, and the man, a simple miner, dashed between them, froze, cast furtive looks back for signs of pursuit, and repeated that same cycle many times before making it home. He staggered under the weight of his burden, but the elation he felt far outweighed his fatigue. Slowly, carefully, he lay his saviour down on the dingy bed.
They were called 'Tenno.'
He would call her beautiful.
And it was a woman, no doubt of that. Tall, fit, and curved. Her armor was colorful and form-fitting, a stark contrast to the patchwork Grineer or the identity-muffling suits of the Corpus. She reminded him of a flower – when he had the time to examine her, he realized she even had a stylised blossom worked into her helmet, and he couldn't help but reach up and…
The man stopped, cursing himself at being distracted and turned to frantically dig through his closet for the medical supplies he'd managed to scrounge up. The Grineer commander, more tank than man, had apparently not gone down easily. The Tenno's side bore several ragged holes, and were slowly leaking a viscous green fluid onto his bed. It wasn't blood – probably some kind of auto-sealant built into her suit. There was no red in the mix that he could see, so that was probably a good sign. But to be sure, he'd have to…
He couldn't find a seam. Or a latch, catch, button, computer interface, or nutrient intake. The suit was sealed, flawlessly. Unless he was willing to take an industrial cutter to the suit (and he wasn't) this would limit what he could do. At least the slow rising and falling of her chest told him she was still breathing, somehow.
He was no doctor, but he did what he could, washing the holes with antiseptics and binding them shut. When he was finished and cleaning the fluid off his hands, he took an experimental sniff. The fluid smelled strange…sweet, like a bit of perfume he'd once smelled on a Corpus executive. Was this what a flower smelled like?
When he returned to her side, he was practically giddy. A single Tenno wiped out a Grineer garrison…what could ten do? Push the Grineer out? What could a hundred Tenno do? Push the Corpus off Mars? It was almost too much to hope for, but he'd seen what she could do with his own eyes…
He idly slid a wet cloth against her forehead, and it came away green. There was a tiny gash across her skull that had cut into the flower. A petal fell into his hands when he probed the damage with his fingers, and he held it in his palm, savoring that same sweet smell. After everything that had happened, he was exhausted, but at the same time, his heart was racing and his hands wouldn't stop shaking.
He sat by the bedside until exhaustion won out. His limbs felt like lead. He tried to lower himself to the ground and fell hard. Darkness swirled at the edge of his vision. He opened his hands slowly, the fingers stiff and unresponsive. He was still holding the petal. The Tenno would be alright, and when she was awake, he could talk to her…ask her name…
The Tenno awoke.
The Grinner commander's weapon had gone off in his death-throes, her memory supplied.
Repairs at 90 percent completion, her systems informed her.
This is not where she fell unconscious, her eyes revealed.
Cold. Dirty. Civilian? Pre-fabricated habitation block. Bed. No hostiles present.
The stream-of-consciousness realizations paused when the Tenno sat up. On the floor next to the bed, a civilian in Martian mining gear lay still.
Dead.
Saryn Warframe-generated toxin exposure showed in the discolored veins and shrunken soft tissue. The male's fingers and most of his hands had been reduced to pitted fragments of bone, piling where they'd fallen around a shard of Warframe carapace.
The Tenno raised a hand, confirming the damage to the helmet. A blank faceplate lowered a second time to note the bandages and antiseptic gel.
The bandages were torn away, and fell to drape across the cooling corpse. Legs patterned with the bright colors of a poisonous predator stepped over the obstruction, but paused in the doorway.
No hostiles in sight.
The door to the home opened slowly, the Tenno stepped out, and the door closed.