Author's Note: Here it is, the next chapter. a day late and feeling like a dollar short, but even with two months to prepare, sometimes it feels like I've got no time to write half of these things. But Doan Tana actually has fans (thank you, btw, even if I don't understand), so this is for you, and it'll always be here.

"Are you all ready?"

Secret nodded and gave the ship in general a thumbs-up.

"Ammunition?"

Doan patted the ammunition pouches on her hips while Secret flicked his fingers and pulled an ammunition packet from his Void pocket.

"Food?"

Secret looked to Doan, who nodded and patted the little pack on her back that held three days' worth of food in horrid Grineer rations. If we'd had anything better, we might have provided it, but food is scarce on Tenno ships. For obvious reasons.

-Yes, and you don't rub it in at all, do you? Maybe someday I'll get a body with a mouth and be able to taste food, too. Then you'll see!-

-That's just mean. At least eat with your mouth closed. The crunching is going to show up on the recording.-

"Armour check?"

At this, Secret crossed his arms impatiently. We'd just finished checking Doan's armour and Secret was, well, set for life.

Doan nodded uncertainly and looked down at the atmospheric station outside the Landing Craft's window. "I think we are ready," she said, hefting her Gorgon. "Er… how do we get out?"

I let Secret beckon Doan over to the center of what was, admittedly, a very small room. He had to put out his hand so she would stand back, but then I simply slid open the panel and Secret lay down in the… the… what do we call the thing that rotates and drops Tenno out of the Landing Craft?

-No, I know it doesn't have a name, I'm asking for suggestions.-

-Er…-

-No, no, it's a wonderful name. It's just, well, have you run it by any of the other Tenno yet? Maybe it's not fair to name it ourselves without any input. Don't you think?-

-I am not doing "that thing". I just think we shouldn't be inconsiderate.-

-I'm always considerate! Now shush, I'm telling a story.-

Once Secret had left, Miss Tana leaned over the Warframe-sized indent in the floor and looked meaningfully up at my avatar. Well, meaningful for somebody with a helmet on.

"Can I just use the back?" she asked, pointing at the part of the ship that usually opened up to attach to the Orbiter.

I took a second look at Secret's method of egress, then at Doan. She was, I admitted, a bit tall for that way out.

"Er," said a younger and less worldly me, thoroughly baffled. "I don't really know. Nobody ever has, without the Orbiter. I'm not even sure I can open it without the attachment."

"Could you try?"

I could, and I did. It took some fiddling and I had to rewrite a bit of code, but I opened the back door of the Landing Craft and Doan simply walked out the back. At the back of the ramp, she stopped for a moment and turned around. She didn't seem certain of what she was supposed to say, because she just waved her hand once, then stepped off the ramp.

Doan landed safely, but not gracefully. She hit a walkway of the Corpus station with a clang that should have carried through the entire facility, and would have if it hadn't been for the company waiting for her.

Doan stood up, said hello to Secret, looked around, and saw Silence and Ind Cusd standing there, with Ind looking much less confused than she really should have.

Ind waved enthusiastically, as if Doan hadn't noticed her.

Herein the contrast between the two should be noted, especially the fact that Miss Tana tends to think things through… at all… because she asked, "what are you doing here?"

-You can't honestly defend that. Ind's explanation was, "Tenno scum."-

-Does that seem like an explanation to you?-

-And would you have expected Ind to explain any better than that?-

-I rest my case.-

So Ind's explanation was a chipper declaration of, "Tenno scum." Silence nodded along as if that explained everything.

-No, it doesn't explain everything. It doesn't explain anything at all.-

-You're not as unpredictable as you think you are.-

-Oh, look, an Orokin tech shipment on Europa!-

-Yes, I'm messing with you.-

Doan wasn't going to get a better explanation and she knew it. The Tenno were mute and Ind had just used up the vast scope of her storytelling abilities. The only thing left to do was follow along with whatever Secret had brought them along for. Which Doan did, for all of twenty meters and one room, until they saw a Corpus patrol.

Given the common emotional reaction to meeting members of the credit cult, it's not surprising that Doan raised her gun and shouted, "attack!"

Tried to shout. Her voice came out so quiet that she barely heard it and couldn't make out the words, and Silence reached out and kept her from properly raising her gun, as well.

Silence quirked her head forward and to the right just a few degrees, then raised her other hand and knocked on the wall.

No sound came out.

Ind started knocking on the wall, too, but Secret led the group forward and Doan grabbed her fellow Grineer's hand to bring her along. The four did a Tenno-and-two-heavy-gunners approximation of creeping forward and around the patrol, which was certainly only possible because of the combination of Silence and Corpus helmets.

They have slit visors. Who thought that was a good idea? Even the Grineer have proper eyeholes. And have you ever seen a Corpus look up? It's not possible! The-

-Right. Sorry.-

The group walked around the Corpus patrol, pausing only long enough for Silence to put an arrow through a camera lens.

The space station was cramped. It's true that some Corpus soldiers are just as tall as Grineer, but where Grineer care for tactical mobility, Corpus prioritize saving credits. That means low ceilings in corridors, efficiently smooth doors, lots of cameras to prevent theft. Only one of those is conducive to convenient sneaking.

It's not the corridors.

Doan and Ind ducked through a doorway, not because they would have hit their heads, but because the door was precisely the height that they wouldn't quite do so and that feels uncomfortable. In the next room, there was another patrol, but this time Secret raised his hand and pointed, nodding to the two Gunners' guns. With a wave of his hand, he disappeared, then Silence stepped forward and raised three fingers.

"They want us to shoot," Doan explained to Ind. Then, "not yet! Wait."

Ind pouted, but waited.

Two fingers.

"When I say," Doan said. Then she stopped to realize that she could hear herself.

Silence looked back and did that head quirk thing again. Then she turned back and gestured with her hand.

One finger.

Doan waited a beat, then ordered, "now, Ind!"

Secret appeared in front of the Corpus patrol, which had just enough time to cry out and raise their guns before a torrent of bullets slammed into them. Shields and then bodies and mechanical parts were shredded in little more than a second and the only return fire hit a Secret that faded away moments later

Secret reappeared moments later to offer a raised hand to Silence, who smacked it, then added a fist bump. Both looked at Doan and Ind, nodding approvingly.

"Don't Tenno-" Doan cut off as her voice went from near-silent to full-time volume as abruptly as Nef Anyo's bank account empties in the Index. Then she shook her head and continued, "don't Tenno kill a hundred times that number every hour? Each?"

Ind nodded. "Lots," she said, then pointed at the bodies that were quickly self-destructing. "Not lots."

It occurs to me that this is both some of the strongest math skills either Grineer has ever produced on short notice and evidence that Doan had been getting up to learning much more about the Tenno than Grineer propagandists preferred their soldiers had access to.

And to that, Secret's reply was a gesture towards himself and a shrug, then pointing at Doan and waving a hand to the now-dust Corpus bodies. He finished with a nod of approval.

Doan and Ind exchanged a look and Doan asked, "good work?"

The Tenno gave nods of confirmation, then turned and ran ahead while the Grineer hurried after, with Doan yelling into the quiet, "where are we going?"

The same thing happened with two more patrols before one annoying osprey finally noticed them too soon to surprise, at which point the whole thing turned into a firefight. The alarms went off and Secret hacked them and… well, you know how that goes. Everything about Tenno and Corpus fighting over computer systems is just proof that they should let Cephalons come on missions.

-I'd be a brilliant hacker. And yet you prefer stopping every thirty seconds to shut off the security.-

-I'm not jealous! I just don't see why you get to send Grineer ships into the sun and I don't.-

While the fighting was going on, something very noticeable and decidedly lacking in subtlety was happening: the Tenno were leaving certain Corpus for the brief and probably inglorious seconds until Doan or Ind noticed and turned their Gorgons on the survivors.

Gorgons do bad things to Corpus. It's like the bullets were designed specifically for - hold on, let me check my notes…

Yes. Gorgon ammunition was designed specifically for dealing with shielded enemies.

-Oh, sure, it's obvious to you. Where's your cited research sources, then? First-hand historical accounts?-

-Shooting Corpus does not count as evidence of a weapon's design origins!-

Every time the group finished off another squad of Corpus, the Tenno would nod and beckon the Grineer on. They spent minutes hurrying deeper and deeper into the station until Doan gave up on asking the mute Warframes why they were here and settled for talking to Ind. Who was, at the moment, poking at Doan's wrist. She didn't actually ask anything, but she poked curiously, seemingly expecting the enlarged piece of armour to do something.

"No, Ind," Doan warned her friend. "That's mine."

Ind nodded and stopped, taking a step back and looking at Doan's armour. She didn't actually say anything for a while, and the Tenno opened the next doorway and started gesturing for the Grineer to follow before Ind said, "good."

There was a word she was searching for, claims Silence, but it was almost a year before the dunce- before Ind learned it. In case it doesn't come up in a later recording, the word Silence taught her was, "pretty." Grineer don't learn that word.

Looking at their ships, it's not surprising.

The next room was larger and Secret and Silence both entered it cautiously, hands raised to slow Doan and Ind.

A voice called out to them from across the room, a Corpus sergeant in one of the biggest exoskeletons their people give out and more than forty of the sergeant's goons and bots.

The room went quiet, though the Sergeant still shouted and his machines still moved to form up around him. Secret appeared beside himself. Doan and Ind raised their guns.

Then the lights flickered.

Secret and Silence looked at each other. They looked at Doan and Ind.

Flickered again.

The two tenno started gesturing quickly at each other and the Grineer, like they were having a silent yelling match. Worse, it looked to Doan like they were panicking.

The lights flickered once more. The doors of the room slammed shut in the darkness and the lights came back on, dimmer than before.

What happened next made it very clear just how much the Tenno had been holding back. Secret swept his hands down in the familiar gesture of breaking most weapons in the area, then a wave of energy blasted from Silence, knocking down the squads. Both Tenno raised their weapons on the helpless Corpus.

In another second, they were all dead, and a sound filled the room. Doan would never have recognized it, but it was the sound of ancient Orokin coming from a throat that was never meant to speak. It wasn't loud, but it was somehow everywhere, hissing-

-Alright, I'll stop.-

-I can mimic the effect, you know.-

-Sorry.-

The shadows coalesced in the room, thickening and shifting as Silence and Secret gathered Doan and Ind together and stood on either side of them, defending them.

"Bad," Ind said, peering into the dark. "Bad, bad."

Doan agreed wholeheartedly. The air was hissing and Doan's eyes couldn't pierce the darkness.

Secret's decoy began to struggle as if it were a living thing, pushing at the shadows that ate at it like acid until there was nothing left.

Then there was the sound. The mission up until then had been muted or silent, but now Doan could hear the creak of her armour, the whirr of her cybernetics, the too-loud sounds of her breath and heartbeat. And the hissing, mockery-of-melody tones of a voice that Doan didn't understand.

-Are you sure you won't tell me what he said? Even for the record?-

-I understand. I'll… turn the lights up a bit brighter, shall I?-

Doan's shoulder clinked against Ind's as the pair edged closer together behind their Tenno protectors.

Then the shadows shifted and something lashed out of them, hitting Secret hard enough to knock him back and disappearing again. Silence whirled and loosed an arrow on the into the darkness, but it hit nothing. Then she waved her hand and suddenly, Doan knew what was out there as if she could see. It was a Tenno, she realized, one that was hunting them, either the Grineer or Tenno.

Then the shadow started eating at the sound as well. It wasn't an easy thing to describe, according to Doan, but her idea of where her target was began to waver and fade.

The others wasted no time. Rifle, machine gun, and bow were raised and fired into the darkness. Sounds of metal on metal rang out, bullets deflecting from a Tenno blade, but a few shots resulted in the sizzling zap of a shield impact.

It wasn't enough and Doan knew it. This was a Tenno, a monster one that was disrupting Secret and Silence's abilities. She had a bit of cleverness to her and had heard the stories of Tenno who could walk through an artillery barrage without concern; neither of her squadmates here were those kind. Without their powers, they had very little. Still, they were Tenno, with Tenno weapons and Tenno skills.

She lowered her Gorgon, raised the right arm of her new armour, and took her aim. Silence's sonar was almost gone, but a wasted shot would mean no chance at all.

"Ready!" Ind shouted, though she couldn't have had any idea what Doan was up to.

Then Doan Tana fired her grappling hook. She held her breath as it flew and an arrow took Silence in the head, lodging in the fanning headpiece of her helmet.

There was the thunk of contact and Doan pulled with all her considerable and augmented might, dragging the Tenno out of the shadows as Ind filled the area with bullets.

Then the rope went slack and Doan overbalanced, pitching forward as a shape came close enough to see. Humanoid, outlined with seething red lines, and carrying a massive scythe. Not that Doan knew or cares what the weapon was called at the time. She almost didn't get time to ever ask the question, as the Stalker sped towards her and swung for her throat.

All she could do was fall.

Then the world twisted and she hit the ground, looking up as Secret stood in Doan's place and took the Stalker's attack on his blade.

There is no question that Secret is good at what he does. He is a swordsman like any Tenno, but back then he was out of practice; the long sleep had dulled him while Stalker had fought for time longer than even I have been around. Had Secret been able to use his powers, he certainly could have held Stalker off long enough to escape. Without them…

-But it was not a fair fight. Remember that.-

It was Ind who moved fastest, though only because she was already shooting. She turned her gun on the Stalker and his shields flashed for a moment before he disappeared and reappeared behind Secret. This time it was Silence who attacked, throwing a blast of sound. The darkness ate at the sound, but the force of it still made the Stalker stumble and have Secret enough time to turn and block the next strike.

There was another flurry of blows so quick that Ind stood no chance of picking a target and even Silence hesitated to take her shot. Instead, she drew her staff and, in one of the most reckless acts in a long, long list of reckless acts, she joined in the melee.

The pair of Tenno held him off, but not unscathed. One of Secret's horns was shorn clean off and Silence took a gash in the shoulder so deep that every block on her right side tore it wider.

Doan didn't get up. The fight had started barely a meter away from her and had passed above her head seven times since it started.

Secret's leg took a gash wide enough to put a hand into and Ind stared at Doan helplessly.

Doan drew her standard-issue sheev and activated it and her radio.

"Ind," she said just loud enough to hear herself over the ringing of swords, "when I say shoot, shoot."

Ind nodded vigorously, which was enough for Doan. As subtly as she could, the squad leader readied herself.

When the Stalker moved close enough, she shouted, "shoot!"

Ind opened fire. Neither Secret nor Silence had any shields left, and their armour cracked and they were thrown off balance as some of the stray shots hit them. The barrage, therefore, had two effects: it shredded the Stalker's shields and put him in a perfect position to finish at least one Tenno.

If Doan had not been ready, if she hadn't moved faster…

Well, she thought he could revive if things went wrong.

We can only be grateful for the discovery of the Reservoir. But that's another story.

It doesn't matter. She was fast enough and that… that isn't an issue anymore. Not for most Tenno. So when she grabbed Stalker by the leg and stabbed her sheev into his knee, when his shields broke and he went stumbled, even for a split second, that was all that was needed.

Gorgon rounds slammed into Stalker hard enough to push him deeper into Doan's vice grip and Silence took the chance to stab him in the ribs with one of her arrows. His response was to backhand her hard enough to snap the weakened portion of her helmet off, then swing his scythe down into Doan's chest.

I take credit for this part. I'm the hero. Secret helped.

-Yes, but you only slowed the blade. It still hit her.-

-And saving her the first time was very heroic, but the second time was my armour that did it.-

-You scanned it, I built it. It's mine. Miss Tana's. Whatever.-

Well, the scythe came down and Secret took a swipe to try to stop it, but he wasn't exactly close enough to really block it, so it came down anyway, just a little slower and off-target. Which meant that, when it hit, it wasn't lethal. It just hurt. A lot.

Miss Tana, sporting a very new but mostly sort of shallow hole in the right side of her chest, decided that letting go of the person who'd done it was necessary. Or her arms decided it, at least. She's informed me in… graphic… terms that she would have held on quite a bit tighter if she could have.

I think it was a good thing she let go. As much damage as they'd done, the Stalker is crafty, vicious, and a more experienced fighter than any single Tenno, but he knows his limits and knows when he is in danger. He escaped, vanished into the darkness, but if he hadn't, there is no guarantee any of them would have survived.

The mission was over at that point. With the Stalker teleported away and the darkness fading, Doan got some medical treatment from the Tenno, then Secret had me call in a different cell to clean up.

Considering the experience most non-Tenno have the first time they meet the Stalker, I am grateful the four of them - yes, even Ind - encountered him together.