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Inspired by a cult classic. I think you'll know it when you see it. ;)

Spoilers

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Director Harr Igan hated space travel.

He'd never been able to stomach that moment when the rail churned to life, when the electromagnetic fields descended over the skin of the ship and sent them hurtling into the black, magnitudes faster than the speed of light. Frozen acceleration, elongated into infinity.

Harr's stomach always reached his destination lightyears ahead of him. At best it meant an appalling bout of nausea. At worst, it meant vomiting his guts onto the deck. None of Harr's colleagues experienced rail sickness to such an extent; his own daughter was blissfully unaffected by it and often made four or five jumps a day, depending on her calendar. Harr couldn't even imagine it. He preferred using the slower wyrm drives whenever possible, even if it meant adding extra hours to his schedule – but an extra two weeks? That kind of delay would have been as ridiculous as it was unacceptable, and so he'd reluctantly given his pilot leave to take them through the Venusian Rail.

Even now, in his twilight years, he'd never quite gotten over how big they were.

A full 13 kilometers from end to end, the Orokin-era construction hung in space like a golden sword, unaffected by solar winds or gravity, or even the passage of time. The forma electroplated onto its hull was as deep and glossy as the day it'd been forged. A handful of Stanchion-class cruisers and rail tractors were clustered nearby, but none were queued to jump. The solar rail was wide open. Harr took a deep breath, mentally preparing himself. At the very least, travel via the Orokin rails was smoother and less discomforting than the jagged pop he experienced when using the smaller, less efficient models built by the Corpus or – Profit forbid – the chugging scrapyards banged together by the Grineer.

In any case, the matter was an academic one. Orokin technology had been studied, dissected and lusted after for generations, but none of the newer constructions could match the Golden Rails for speed and distance, regardless of how many billions of credits the Company poured into them on a yearly basis. Whatever sorcerous technology gave them their immense power, it had died with the Orokin.

"Ready, sir?"

"Spare me the stupid questions, Rhys."

The pale tongues of energy leaping between the rail's arms began to glow, building up a charge. Gyros started to clock, dynamos began to spin; an ayatan sculpture in everything but name and function, monuments to an empire of dead immortals. Harr planted himself in his chair and clutched at his armrests. He didn't close his eyes. Closing them always made it worse. A moment later, the yacht surged forward on a cosmic jet of light, the rail producing more energy in a single moment than the sun did in a day.

Harr felt that familiar moment of weightlessness, of his brain floating inside his skull, of the atoms in his fingertips slowly drifting apart. As always, his anxiety did nothing to help the rising discomfort. He'd heard stories of overclocked, poorly maintained rail tractors. He'd even witnessed the grisly results for himself on one occasion. Musculoskeletal damage. Cerebral hypoxia. Retinal hemorrhaging. Acceleration trauma was a killer, and it could happen aboard even the most luxurious of pleasure barges. Harr clamped his back teeth against the emerging nausea, cursing the Board, the solar rails, and that doddering old fool Alad V most of all. He'd had to cancel a shochu tasting and two second quarter audits – one with the head of Anyo Corporation – to make this trip.

His soft fingers tightened on his armrests-

-and just like that, the blaze of light dropped away as though it'd never been there at all. The jolt of deceleration was very slight, but it was still more than enough to hurl Harr's stomach up to shake hands with his tonsils. He swallowed it back down with a mouthful of watery bile.

A few hundreds kilometers ahead of his yacht, Jupiter loomed huge, its surface banded with clouds and eternal, whirling storms. Here the sun was pale and dim. Harr could see it at the very edge of his viewscreen, barely larger than a marble. He forced his fingers to unclench, breathing to calm the dangerous squeeze in the back of his throat. The scopolamine patch he'd slapped behind his ear was starting to itch. Harr gave it a quick scratch, then forced himself to leave it be. Long experience had taught him that peeling it off so soon after a jump, let alone with another looming on the horizon, was never a good idea.

"Bring us around to Valefor – and do it slowly," he said sourly. "I need a minute."

"Should I radio ahead?"

"Don't bother. The imbecile knows we're coming."

Of Jupiter's seventy nine moons, only four were large enough to be spherical, and of those Europa was by the far the smallest, a desolate ball of water-ice and patchy brown silicate. Harr took a cautious sip of water as they descended through the moon's thin atmosphere. Below them, the glacial plains and pressure ridges were the color of almond marzipan basking under a cold sunset. Here the glaciers were dotted with the shattered wreckage of an Obelisk cruiser, an embarrassing testament to several billion credits in lost equipment and personnel. Salvage operations had been in full swing for months, but so far the Company had only recouped a quarter of the loss, with returns decreasing every day. In addition to the fragmented infrastructure, seared electronics and difficult surface conditions, outgoing salaries were taking a hefty bite out of their profit margins. Harr made a mental note to speak with the Board about using labor out of Fortuna, especially those about to go into repo. More than likely, they'd take an 82% wage decrease in return for a postponement – maybe 90%, if they were smart.

"Personal Log: remember Fortuna at next week's meeting."

They flew over the broken Obelisk and a handful of Grineer galleons partially buried beneath the snow. Eventually they, too, would be picked apart for resale, but for now the vomit-yellow carapaces lay untouched, the husks of giant beetles that'd crawled into the wastes to die. In moments they were no longer visible. Darkness closed in around the yacht as they passed Europa's terminator and flew into the deep black of night. Harr watched the temperature gauges fall even lower.

"Balmy night," Rhys commented.

The kid's idea of "balmy" was a deadly -170 degrees centigrade. Harr suppressed a snort. He was feeling marginally better now, and not a moment too soon. He took another, larger sip of water and recapped the bottle. He couldn't imagine why Alad had sequestered himself in the absolute middle of nowhere, but the Valefor Mare was where the Board had told him to go. Looking out into the darkness, Harr hoped he hadn't been too flippant when he'd said that Alad was expecting them. The man was twitchy enough in broad daylight and being shot down by a pack of trigger-happy ambulas' was not as remote a possibility as Harr would have liked.

"Get on the comms and find out where we're supposed to land," he said.

Ryhs flashed him a sly look. "Change your mind?"

"Just do it, Rhys. I don't pay you to be a smartass."

Technically he didn't pay the kid at all. While he himself was unmodded, Ryhs was still paying off the debt his father had accrued working out of Proteus Orbital Mining Company: zero-G hazmat upgrades, class-5 hydraulics. The full package. Harr didn't know if the old man had been brain-shelved or not, nor did he particularly care. Ryhs was a solid pilot and a semi-decent valet. The boy would work it off eventually – if he could lean to keep his mouth shut.

The comms chimed and a message began scrolling by. On a coded channel, no less.

"They're telling us to break off and turn around," said Ryhs.

Nice try, Alad.

"And you can tell them you're just going to fly around in circles into they give us a landing coordinate," Harr told him shortly, folding his arms. There'd been ample opportunities for Alad to schedule his calendar, and Harr was utterly out of patience with him.

Ryhs forwarded the message. Less than fifteen seconds later, he got a response – far quicker than Harr had anticipated, having expected Alad to leave him out to dry for as long as the prick thought he could get away with. Ryhs squinted at the line of code, then shrugged. "Better suit up, sir," he said, dimming the yacht's lights. "You're going to be walking a bit."

After a few minutes of careful maneuvering, Rhys set the craft down in a patch of snow. Standing in the yacht's small airlock, Harr lowered the boxy helmet over his head and felt it pressurize, adding the universe and everything in it to his list of profanities.

"Need any help?" Rhys asked him over the comm.

"Boy, I've been putting these suits on longer than you've even been alive," Harr spat, double-checking the huge metal cuffs. The metallic taste of recycled air had already begun to coat his tongue. "Open the damn door."

"Remember, they said to follow the beacons."

The hatch popped open with a rush of displaced air, and Harr stepped out into the darkness of the second moon. There was no wind, no weather, only the icy dark of oblivion. Snow and methane ice crunched beneath the EVA-suit's chunky, ill-fitting boots. Harr furiously keyed the helmet's enhanced visual suite and watched as more beacons flickered to life, their glow invisible to the naked eye – and nearly everything else, too. He tracked them up the ridge until they disappeared.

Murder would be too good for Alad V, he decided.

Slow torture would be far better.

Stepping carefully, Harr set out along the path. Jupiter's largest moon, Ganymede, was just coming up on the horizon, bathing the ground in ashen grey light. There were no clouds in the sky. Europa's atmosphere was too minimal to support them and the vacuum of space seemed to hug unusually close as a result, the brutal cold turning the stars into crystalline daggers. Harr could already feel the blistering temperature against the skin of his suit. Life support was keeping it at bay, but only for a short time. A few hours, at most. Harr unconsciously walked a little faster.

The jumbled ridge climbed several meters, a fresh layer of powder disguising the deadly slick of ice just inches below. Harr stumbled twice before finally reaching the dark, folded opening of a cave. Five meters inside he found a heavy blast door. It was obviously of Grineer design, looking as though it'd been pried from the belly of a galleon and fitted into the passageway with a sloppy combination of solder and brute force. Before Harr could dwell on the oddity, however, the hatch burst open. Two military spooks and a handful of MOAs were waiting for him.

"This way," the larger one told him shortly.

Harr was vaguely certain he knew the man, but couldn't put a name to that thin, furrowed expression.

Beyond the door was a pressurized habitation bubble and Harr was urged to remove his helmet and EVA-suit before proceeding deeper inside. The air around him was as tepid as bathwater. Survivable, but not entirely comfortable. Harr shivered as he raked stayed wisps of hair back into his cowl. Beyond the grungy, prefab walls, the icy cold of Europa pressed in.

"I've come to speak with Alad V on behalf of the Board," he stated crisply.

"So I've heard."

The words was harsh and gravely, shimmering with the feedback of a replaced larynx. Harr remembered the voice better than the face, but still couldn't recall his name. Either way, he didn't like the man's tone, or his utter lack of deference towards his betters. He held his tongue, however, leery of the potential for further delay. He wanted to rake Alad over the coals and be off this icy little pucker of a moon.

They descended into the warren of passageways. Everywhere was a combination of Grineer salvage and Corpus technology, the latter looking as though it'd been welded overtop in order to make the former functional. The gelid air tasted recycled. The scrubbers needed changed two weeks ago. Harr's boots scuffed on length of plastic tarpaulin. Half the facility looks as though it'd been prepped for surgery. Thankfully his eyes had already adjusted to Europa's gloom, otherwise he might have been feeling around like a blind man. The lights had been set to red, crimson as burning blood.

Harr was lead through several narrow, pressurized doorways into a long room cramped to capacity with banks of monitoring equipment and technicians. There was barely enough room to turn around, let alone work. Less than two meters ahead, his escort laid his hand on someone's shoulder. The other man swiveled quickly; he'd been so engrossed in whatever he'd been doing, the gesture seemed to have startled him.

"Director Igan, sir."

The smaller man's lip curled. "I told the Board this little, uh, welfare check could wait!" His voice was a duality of contradictions, the syllables oddly enunciated, modulating between irritably high-pitched and unusually bass, like electricity thrumming through a downed wire. He turned furiously in Harr's direction. "Do you have any idea what you could have ruined by coming here? Why tonight of all nights?!"

Harr affixed a polite look to his face. "You know it wasn't my decision," he answered in an equitable tone. "You've been putting the Board off for months. Half a million credits in men and resources? They're very interested in where your funding is going, Alad."

"None of their business, that's where," said Alad V tartly. Beneath the heavy coat of interlocking blue tiles, he was stooped and frail, and it took him a moment to dodder into Harr's personal space. Harr resisted the urge to lean away from the viscous cloud of scent that clung to Alad's skin; warm vinyl and white, florid poison. The back of Harr's throat watered with fresh nausea.

"I'm on the cusp of a new venture here," Alad continued loudly. "The last thing I need is you mucking up months of work! You've seen enough to satisfy the rest of the Board, yes? Go on now – shoo! I'm very busy at the moment!" He made a nervous fluttering motion with his hands.

As if it was going to be that easy.

"So far I haven't seen anything except an abundance of plastic sheeting," Harr countered.

"A domicile of convenience," said Alad, waving him off. He wasn't even looking at Harr, much to the Director's private annoyance, and kept glancing at the monitor feeds, absently tugging and wringing his fingers.

"I take it the Grineer stench doesn't bother you then?" Harr asked him. "No, I supposed it wouldn't, considering your line of work. But surely there are better accommodations elsewhere in the system – for whatever it is you're doing down here, exactly…"

Harr trailed off deliberately, knowing Alad was smart enough to fill in the blanks. Instead the vexing sonuvabitch actually chuckled at him.

"Mmmm, yes… you'd like to know, wouldn't you, Director?"

Well, at least he was paying attention now.

"I would, actually," said Harr firmly. "And since I've flown all the way out here, maybe you'd be willing to indulge me? You know the Board's getting impatient with all the secrecy. I assume you've made a good deal of progress in this venture? Shame for you to have come so far, only to lose their backing now."

Alad's pale eyes flashed. "Well, then… I wouldn't want to seem an ungracious host," he said, clasping his hands together with a moist, rubbery little sound. "May I offer you a cup of kahve? You must be parched after traveling out here. I'm certain you skipped breakfast, too. Wouldn't want any, hm, unfortunate accidents."

Harr smiled a cold, plastic smile. "No, thank you."

Alad almost smirked at him. Almost, but not quite. He gestured magnanimously at the computers. "Ah, well," he said softly. "In any case, if it's progress you want, Director, I've got something you might find interesting. Have a look at this."

He tapped the console and a carousel of images resolved between them. Harr resigned himself to a long evening. He'd shared the Board with Alad long enough to know the man was only acquiescing to demands because he'd been boxed into a corner. Now that he was there, however, Harr expected he'd have to put up with Alad's usual dog-and-pony show, which didn't bode well for the headache starting to eat through his temples. For a moment, he sorely regretted declining that kahve. He took a step forward.

"And what am I looking at?" he asked.

"A demonstration of my, hm, 'line of work'."

Dog-and-pony show it was, then. Harr leaned closer to examine the jumble of images, many of them culled from grainy security camera footage. There were also several tables of sensor data; forma, rubidium, null energy emissions – things Harr didn't understand or couldn't make use of. He focused on the images instead. It was a grisly presentation, and much of it didn't make sense. He saw Grineer piked on glowing shafts of light and Corpus taxmen crushed into mutilated tangles of bone and twisted, bloody vinyl, as if a black hole had simply opened inside them.

"Wonderful, isn't it," Alad chortled, "how efficiently they kill?"

"They?"

Harr's voice was steady, much to his relief, but the annoyance he'd been hoping to inject fell utterly flat. Alad lazily rotated the images by way of an answer, one side of his mouth lifted into a smirk. This time the hologram showed a collection of beings unlike anything Harr had ever seen before. Each bore the opulence of Orokin forma, of technology not so much built, as grown.

Harr carefully, oh, so carefully, kept the shock from reaching his face. There'd been rumors of late, of the hollow soldiers in twisted frames, so beautiful that even the stars wept, but to be honest, he hadn't given them much credence. It wasn't as if such things concerned him, anyway. He was the head of Solaris Industrial Management, herding the wretched droves of rig jockeys and laborers to where they'd be of the most use. His sphere of influence did not include resurrected Orokin bogeymen.

Speaking of which, one stood at least seven feet tall, shoulders like a tank, arms and legs like ancient trees. In his fist, he held the pulverized remains of a Grineer skull. Another walked on rivers of lazuline flame. A third stood in a field of corpses, the air around her thick with toxins. Her victims had not died well, pierced by worming, questing vines that'd burrowed through their flesh and bloomed from the pulpy ruin of their eyes, each tendril crowned by a flower dripping with deadly golden nectar. Harr fought his rising bile, aware that Alad was observing him through the hologram, watching him with the same colorless, glinting eyes that'd so methodically dissected the carnage, jotting his disturbing observations down in the margins.

Harr tried to gather his wits for a comeback.

"Are these-"

"Real?" Alad cut in smoothly. "Or were you going to ask if they're recent? I assure you they are. Did you forget to keep your ear to the ground – or did you simply prefer to, hmm, not notice? I've identified four of the Betrayers so far, including the little, ah, blossom that's drawn your eye. She's quite the spectacle, isn't she?"

Alad gave the footage a long look. "They've been sighted all across the System," he continued. "Their 'loyalties', shall we say, are questionable at best. They seem to attack indiscriminately regardless of faction, but one thing's for certain."

He brought up a chart showing the various planets and their nodes. Many were blinking a deep, dangerous crimson.

"Ara, Mars. Phobos. Europa," said Alad, pointing to each one in turn. "These, ah- what were they called? – "Tenno", yes, are drawn by strife and conflict. It seems that even Orokin blood was not enough to sate their palettes."

He said it in a tone of amusement, as if the concept were some fascinating curio. Harr moistened his lips with his tongue. Beneath his cowl, his skin suddenly felt too small for his scalp. Hundreds of questions tumbled through his head, but he could not voice them, would not give Alad the satisfaction of knowing he'd been caught off-guard. He took a surreptitious look around the room, at the banks of monitors and camera feeds.

"Is that what you're doing? Monitoring their activities?" Harr asked in a would-be casual tone.

One of the computers suddenly began emitting the sharp, repetitive tone of an alarm. Several of Alad's technicians, who'd otherwise been studiously ignoring the conversation going on around them, abruptly sprang to life, wheeling chairs into stations and pulling up sensor feeds, fluttering the loose papers tacked to the walls. Alad whirled through the hologram, scattering pixels like luminescent confetti.

"Is it her?" he demanded excitedly. "Keyz, is it her?!"

At some point, Harr's impertinent minder had slid into one of the chairs and put on a headset. Harr remembered him now: Garmen Keyz, belligerent son of salvage operator Tudk Keyz, ex-taxman and former security guard, infamous throughout the Corpus for never holding the same position for more than a year.

"Unknown, sir," he responded. "We're picking up activity in sector 4."

A three-dimensional map blinked to life on the monitor, showing a craggy, twisting warren of what Harr assumed to be underground tunnels. A red dot briefly flashed into existence, then disappeared. A moment later, it appeared further down the passageway.

"Target's moving," Keyz confirmed. "We're reading positive for Void energy."

Alad elatedly clapped the back of the man's chair as Keyz opened up the comms. "Attention all units: Target 1 has just entered Sector 4, moving west through Sectors 5 and 6. Power up all systems on my mark… 3... 2... 1... Mark."

At least half of the surrounding monitors switched views. There were twelve in all, each displaying a shaky helmet cam and heart-rate monitor. Harr watched a team of men in silver EVA-suits go through an obvious systems check, all of them hefting Deras and blocky weapons painted in danger yellow. Harr recognized them for what they were. Spark shots, as they were colloquially known, were capable of delivering over two thousand amps via propelled needles. He'd seen men use them on the Orb Vallis for subduing the massive brindled kubrodons that roamed that snowy landscape.

"Comms check," said a gruff voice, heavily modulated by his helmet vocoder.

"Comms show green," Keyz replied, leaning past Alad to toggle something on the control board. A dozen cold, blue triangles appeared on the map, each of them tagged with a serial number. "Descend to the lower levels. Target's still moving, heading towards the number 2 junction."

Harr felt the tension in the air like a hand across the back of his neck.

This wasn't a sudden, panicked scramble; these men had been waiting.

Alad had been waiting.

"What's all this?" Harr asked tightly.

"This? This is history," said Alad. "Come, come!"

He beckoned to Harr without looking at him, his reedy tenor grating on the Director's slowly fraying nerves. Harr tentatively took a step in.

"It's taken us nearly two months to learn her patterns," Alad breathed. He'd gone back to anxiously wringing his hands, making his lurid yellow gloves squeak constantly from the movement. "This, ah, this place-" he gestured at the rusted, peeling walls, "-was a mining hub for the Grineer, right up until our little visitor chased them off. Their tunnels penetrate several kilometers into the ice, right down to the ocean. She returns here every two weeks to collect nitain."

Alad tracked the blinking dot as it descended deeper into the tunnels. His men were taking a more circumferential route, moving parallel to the Tenno's path and descending at a much slower rate, using what looked like a network of elevators, stopes and winzes to make up the difference. Were they attempting to cut the thing off, or simply shadowing it? At the bottom of the map, Europa's dark, subterranean ocean beckoned to them both. Harr fought for something to say, but words had escaped him. He glanced at Alad out of the corner of his eye, saw the gleam of sweat on the man's pasty forehead.

"Punch up three," Alad whispered.

Keyz moved a toggle on the console, seemingly unperturbed by the moist exhalations on the back of his neck. One of the monitors switched over from a sensor feed to a grainy shot of an empty tunnel. The glacial walls looked perfectly smooth, almost slick to the touch, the ancient ice squeezed into fantastic shapes by the daily tug of Jupiter's gravity. Harr was inexplicably reminded of Orokin coolant – if that viscous fluid could somehow have been rendered inert.

The silence began to stretch, broken only by the low, rhythmic beeping of the computers. Something moved at the edge of the camera and Alad leaned in, breathless with anticipation. In the pitch darkness of the moon's interior, the camera saw only in shades of pastel, but that was more than enough to see it.

Undeniably feminine, with curvaceous thighs and a svelte, narrow waist. Alive, but not living. Humanoid, but not human. If anything, it was a relic of an era long snuffed from existence. How could something so flawless, so beautiful even exist? And how much would it be worth, Harr wondered? A billion credits? Two billion? He tried to wet his lips with his tongue, but it was like rasping them with sandpaper. Beside him, Alad was scribbling frantically into a data HUD, so fast the hologram could barely keep up.

The monitors fuzzed, momentarily dissolving into static.

Alad glanced at them sharply. "What's this interference?" he demanded.

"Ion storms from Ganymede. Correcting the problem now, sir," said Keyz.

The Tenno disappeared from the camera, but not before Harr noticed that she'd brought a small hoverlift with several stout, cylindrical containers rattling around on top. "You said it comes to harvest nitain?" he managed, trying to regain some traction.

Alad nodded distractedly. He tapped Keyz with the back of his hand.

"Bring up everything at the harvest site," he said.

The monitors switched over to multiple views of to an underground grotto filled with abandoned machinery. Everything shimmered with a layer of crystalline ice, safety rails dripping with icicles as thick around as Harr's wrist. Two thousand feet beneath the surface, and the Grineer had yet to reach the moon's rocky crust. At the far end of the cavern lay Europa's subsurface ocean, a dark, slushy mix of liquid hydrogen and salt water. There was no light in that deep place and against the starkness of the ice, the ocean itself was pure black, depthless as the fathomless dark that lay between the stars.

The Tenno emerged from the east side of the chamber, pushing the hoverlift ahead of her. She wasn't in a hurry. That much was readily apparent. She moved with an easy, deadly grace, full hips swaying, crossing her tiny feet in front of her with every step. Harr leaned in to get a better look. No images of the Betrayers existed; even hard evidence of their existence was scare, with everything but their legend having faded from living memory. Harr had expected them to be larger, fiercer, something spawned from the hellish nightmares his daughter had awoken from as a child, not this exquisite doll.

"Overwatch, please confirm: sensors show the target has reached the harvest zone," the comms squelched. Harr took a deep breath through his nose and tried to keep his heart rate down. The sudden noise hadn't startled him. Definitely not.

"Overwatch confirms," Keyz replied. He checked the three-dimensional grid on the monitor, where the dozen blinking triangles were about to coverage on the cavern. "Capture Team, slow your progress. Target has yet to enter the water."

"Capture?" Harr whispered. "Are you out of your mind? It's a Tenno!"

Alad gave him a lurid smile. "I know what the word means, Director." He bent his face towards Harr, his eyes maddeningly intent and the sharp, sour sting of menthol on his breath. "I also know of devices with the power to transform a blast furnace into a tundra, to bring dead species back from extinction! Think of what the Tenno can- can give us: a new era of technology! No more picking at the scraps like dogs. No- no more wasting profits trying to piece together broken remnants!"

Harr desperately wanted to lean back, regretting ever having gotten this close.

"The Tenno- these, ah, these Warframes were the pinnacle of Orokin technology, a legacy so powerful it brought them to their knees! I've waited over a year for this moment and I'm not going to miss the chance!"

Harr regarded him with a kind of mute horror as Alad switched his attention back to the monitors. The Tenno had stopped at the edge of the ocean. Derricks and heavy winches stood mutely in the darkness, creating a tangled forest of metal and thick, blue-gray ice. The wharf, if Harr could still call it that, had been partially reclaimed by the water and much of the machinery stood in Europa's shallow tide. The Tenno stopped at the water's edge and lifted both arms over her head, lithe as a dancer, her body arcing away from them as she stretched.

Harr felt an uneasy pang in his stomach. The motion was so utterly, unbearably human – but the Tenno couldn't be something so mundane, could they? Over the years there had been much speculation that the Betrayers were nothing living at all, but rather an enclave of thinking machines little different from the Sentients. Harr wondered which it was, watching as the Tenno bent at the waist and lifted several canisters from the hoverlift. Empty nitain capsules, just as Alad had said.

"What could it possibly want with those?" Harr demanded.

"The same thing we all want, I suspect," Alad rasped. "Either they're selling to anyone with enough, heh, stones to deal with them – or they're manufacturing products of their own. And that isn't good for anybody, now is it?"

Ignorant of being watched, the Tenno plunged into the icy waters and disappeared. Keyz touched his comm. "Target has just entered the water. Approximately t-minus five minutes until reemergence," he announced. "Safeties off. Offensive formation Rita."

Harr tried not to imagine the Tenno stroking through the icy, Stygian waters, her supple body whipping back and forth like some exotic servofish. Nitain was farmed at the mouth of hydrothermal vents, where blind tubeworms and pale, eyeless crabs lived in utter darkness, under pressures that would crush an armored vault. Nitain mining had to be done via remote, typically with the aid of robotic proxies and several kilometers of fiber optic cabling, yet the Tenno intended to swim down there like an Ostron free-diving for pearls? Harr's stomach churned, unable to break that kind of power into a number he could quantify.

In the upper left of the monitors, Alad's capture team swept into the grotto, fanning out into a loose semi-circle. Harr barked a laugh. "You expect to take that thing unawares standing right in front of her?" he jeered.

Alad flicked him a coy, sidelong little glance.

His men shimmered out of existence.

Harr felt his face redden in anger. Alad was a member of the Board, same as him, but even so, he hadn't expected the man to have that kind of clout. Even one of those cloaking devices cost a small fortune.

"I'm certain the Betrayers see in only two spectrums of light: visible and infrared," Alad explained smugly. "I've studied security footage of a Tenno penetrating several, ah, data vaults inside one of our manufacturing plants. No alarms were tripped. Nobody even knew it was there until long after the fact. Those vaults were guarded by automated laser grids – invisible to the naked eye, but quite, ah, distinct, yes, when viewed in infrared."

Harr directed a pointed look at Alad's team, specifically their shoulder-mounted searchlights.

"Ultraviolet light," said Alad simply. "Invisible to the Betrayer."

"So you think," Harr told him flatly, hoping he sounded unimpressed.

"So I know," Alad replied. That coy little smile was back again. "Each camera is equipped with an ultraviolet emitter, and despite two months of surveillance, the Betrayer has remained blissfully unaware of them. Unlike the infrared cameras employed by those Grineer dogs."

"Sir," Keyz warned urgently.

The Tenno had emerged from the water, rivulets of waters cascading down her body and dripping from the twin tails of her helmet. Every segment of her was trimmed in Orokin forma; with her delicate, slippered feet and softly glowing eyes, she looked more suited to one of Ki'Teer's extravagant parties.

The Betrayer carefully deposited her cargo onto the hoverlift, the phosphorescence of nitain visible through the canister's small round portholes. She squatted down to reattach the webbing holding her prizes in place. Out of the corner of his eye, Harr saw something move on another monitor. Snow crunched. A cascade of ice slithered from a low-hanging pipe.

The Tenno's head snapped around, golden dangles swaying with the movement. In the darkness, her eyes glowed like open pits. A moment passed, then another. The Betrayer tilted her head to the side, peering into the empty darkness. Searching, or perhaps sensing.

Alad's hands knotted together, his gloves pulled tight with the strain.

The Tenno swiveled on the balls of her feet, squatting with one elbow propped casually on her knee. Her head rotated slowly, sweeping the hub from right to left, then back again. The only other thing that moved was the frosted purple fingers of her right hand, absently tapping a rhythm on the surface of the nitain canister. Harr tried to measure the distance, but found he'd completely lost track of the team. They could have advanced by inches or meters. He tried desperately to remember what that grimy conservationist had said regarding the operational range of a spark shot. Three, maybe four meters?

The Tenno's eyes flashed a pale blue, sweeping from left to right, then back to deep amethyst.

Two seconds later, it happened again.

Still the Betrayer didn't move.

Orange light blazed in the Tenno's eyes and for a brief moment, Harr thought he saw a mask of pixelated trapezoids, searing through the darkness like fire. The Betrayer gave a sharp twitch, canting her upper body away from them. She rose from her crouch and stood, leaning into a hip and folding her arms across her sizable chest.

Laughter splintered through the grotto, audible even over the monitors. Gooseflesh raced over Harr's scalp and down his back in a gush of cold sweat. It was no ordinary laughter, the sound doubling and tripling, echoing in the darkness as though many forms were laughing at once, each slightly out of sync with one another, so that the whole was jagged and discordant, like a tumble of crystalline shards.

Harr seized Alad's frail shoulder. "She sees them, Alad! Get them out. GET THEM OUT!"

The Betrayed arched both arms over her head, fingers leaving a comet trail of purple sparks. Suddenly, she wasn't altogether there, as though the penumbra of an eclipse had simply slid over her. Still there, but blurry now, part of the deep shadows that surrounded her. She laughed again and something formed between the shadow of her hands, something prismatic and dazzling. She hurled it ahead of her like a meteor, so bright Harr thought it would burn even the ice itself, radial spikes of light stabbing in all directions. A moment later, it exploded.

Alad threw both hands up in front of his eyes. For a few seconds, the sudden brilliance and twinkling reflections blinded them all, the comms lit up with a chorus of startled oaths. Harr was the first to blink the sting out of his eyes. The Betrayer was gone, but a frantic search of the monitors revealed movement near the roof of the cavern. The Tenno had jumped nearly ten meters into the air, tossing her legs up and over her head. The motion was difficult for Harr to see, like tracking a mote at the corner of his vision. His eyes just didn't want to look.

Arching her body, the Tenno landed on her feet with a sound like breaking glass. Colors burst and splintered, and suddenly there were five Betrayers were once there had been only one. Moving together, each a mirror image of the other, the deadly carousal of images pinwheeled to the side and opened fire with guns that simply hadn't been there before. Screams filled the cavern. Two of Alad's men dropped, their cloaks sputtering out of existence as dozens of heavy-bore flechettes tore through their equipment. The quintuplet pinwheeled again, this time to the left. Another solider fell down dead, his helmet cam reeling in a fountain of blood. The shrill tones of flatlines stabbed through the monitor room.

"Open fire!"

Somewhere deep in the bowels of the moon, someone had recovered enough wits to realize they were under attack. Rifle fire seared the air between Alad's men and the Tenno, passing through most of the illusions without harm.

"No!" Alad screeched. "I said I want her alive!"

It was doubtful any of the men heard him, or even cared if they did. Exotic gunfire chattered again; hard and metallic sharp, letting fly another barrage of bolts. Harr watched as the ultraviolet lights mounted to each man's shoulder – the ones the Betrayer shouldn't have been able to see – exploded in a rain of shrapnel. Laughter crackled through the frozen air as the Tenno pirouetted away into the dark.

Alad's men bunched into a circle. Something gold flickered on the other side of grotto. One of the men opened fire at it, splintering the ancient stalagmite into dust. The golden thing darted away, its image refracting oddly, a kaleidoscope of illusions flickering between translucent planes of ice. Harr was inexplicably reminded of a hall of mirrors. He anxiously dug his fingers into the cold, segmented tiles of Alad's coat. The older man viciously shrugged him off, seizing a spare comm unit from the console.

"She's beneath the catwalk! Right there!" he shouted, watching the pulsing red dot on the map.

"Where? Dammit, I can't see her! Give me a coordinate!"

Someone pointed his spark shot in the direction of the derricks and squeezed the trigger, launching both prongs and their insulated copper wires. The passed through the mirage without harm and stuck in the side of a piece of machinery. Sparks exploded from the contact point as hundreds of amps of electricity throbbed through the wires. In the sudden burst of light, Harr saw the Betrayer launch out of the shadows, embers dancing on her chitinous hide, and slam both feet into the man's chest, throwing him back with the force of speeding coil drive. He was shot dead before his corpse had even hit the floor, a trio of sharpened bolts – no longer than the span of Harr's palm – embedded the middle of his chest, hitting him such force that his body was carried into the wall and pinned there like a butterfly to a collection card.

Dera fire lit up the darkness as another man went full auto, chipping ice from the derelict machinery as the Betrayed tucked her knees and threw herself into a perfectly controlled slide. The man tried to turn – only to catch the needles of spark shot directly in the back, his body convulsing as the deadly amperage fried his nerves to a crisp. His inadvertent killer frantically tried to disengage, snapping the filaments trailing from the weapon and pumping it for another shot, but not fast enough. On tiptoe, the Tenno twirled herself upright behind him and pressed both tiny, gun-wielding hands to either side of his helmet. A quick wrench – the wet, fibrous crunch of twisted bone clearly audible over the comms – and suddenly the only thing keeping the man's head from sitting backwards on his shoulders was the crooked helmet itself, leaking air from a pressure breach.

Harr reeled away, one hand against his stomach, and vomited onto the floor, his guts heaving and twisting to expel a sad mixture of water and thin, ropy strings of bile. The spatter was a distant thing, submerged under the chatter of gunfire and breaking ice. Another monitor flatlined, then another. And another. Harr balled his hand into a fist and shoved it into his mouth, unable to keep from lifting his eyes back to the carnage.

The Tenno darted forward, shooting another man through the narrow slit of his helmet, then pivoting to sweep the legs out from beneath a second. The motion was blindingly fast, and so powerful the man actually twirled midair before she brought her heel down across the small of his back, driving him face first into the snow. His helmet cam whirled drunkenly, then showed a jagged spiderweb of gore dappled glass. The comms picked up one last wretched, bloody gasp – then all was silent.

Dead. They're all dead, thought Harr hysterically.

The Tenno rose from her partial crouch, effortlessly poised on one leg, the other held so that the sole of her foot hovered against her inner thigh. A gilded heron standing in a marsh of bloody snow. Her head turned slowly in Harr's direction, eyes gleaming, and the Director let out a ragged sort of whimper – as if somehow that terrible, elegant thing could see him, as if she was now pondering how to dispose of him next: blunt-force trauma or evisceration?

She twirled the weapons in her hands and laughed, terrible and crystalline, the fool who fiddled on the rooftop as the Orokin empire burned. Panic surged in Harr's throat again. We- we should leave. It's coming for us- for me next! That's what he wanted to say, but the words got lost in his throat and the only thing that emerged was a moan.

"Sweet profit, would you get ahold of yourself before you piss the floor next?" Alad snapped at him. Except for his dilated pupils, so huge that his iris was only a thin, grey ring nearly indistinguishable from the white of his eye, the older man was disturbingly apathetic towards the slaughter.

Laughter again.

Clapping one of those massive guns to her thigh, the Tenno blew them a kiss before lifting her remaining weapon and shooting the camera out in a blast of static. One by one, the monitors went dark. Alad made a disgusted face. "Well," he deadpanned. "That went to shit in a hurry."

He irritably flung the comms unit back onto the console. It skipped off and landed on the floor with a clatter, narrowly missing the puddle of vomit at Harr's foot. The Director gave it a blank look, unable to grasp Alad's cavalier outlook on the situation. Had he even been watching that- that massacre?

"Ensure all that data is uploaded off-site," said Alad. "I want another team ready to go down into those tunnels. Whatever she was using for ammunition, I must, mmm, study it, yes. Make sure you watch the sensors for that ship of hers!" He was typing furiously into his codex, adding to his notations.

He'd been watching, all right – with an intensity that was downright disturbing. Harr's knees felt like jelly. He thought he might add a little more to that puddle, if there'd been anything left in his stomach to give. The noises around him seemed far away, or at the bottom of a deep well. Half a million in credits and resources. That's what he'd told Alad.

Suddenly it seemed too small a sum.

It was over forty-five minutes before Harr was allowed to make the trip back to his yacht. He stumbled into the airlock, leaving pieces of his EVA-suit on the floor as he made his way to the cabin. Ryhs hastily took his feet off the console, trying to hide a clove cigarette behind his back, the spicy-sweet stench of it heavy in the cabin. Harr didn't bother to scold him, ordering the kid to take them off the moon and out of the system altogether. He'd been expecting Alad to be neck-deep in weapon's development – something akin to Glast's animo project, something he was desperate to keep from the Board until all the patents were secured. But this?

He didn't know what madness turned the cogs in Alad's head, but if he could capture even one of the Betrayers, the man's influence and financial clout would outstrip the other members of the Board by more than half! But that wasn't the worst of it. The worst was the images that had followed Harr into the plush luxury of his yacht, the sounds he kept hearing over the finely-tuned pulse of the engines. Again and again and again.

He'd believed in the Tenno, but he'd never thought to believe in their resurrection. To him, to the galaxy at large, they'd been specters relegated to the murk of a distant past. He shouldn't have been surprised, though. Species long since thought dead had reappeared on the Orb Vallis. If those stupid pobbers had managed to hibernate these long centuries, why not the Betrayers, themselves little more than stainless steel rats gnawing at the wealth of better society?

Harr clutched at the back of his neck, thinking of that dull and gory snap. She'd done it so easily – and why not? She and others like her had once hunted the Seven to their gleaming judicial halls and opened their throats like common criminals, humiliating them in their last moments of life. They'd carved their way through ranks of Dax soldiers for the pleasure of that moment, men more perfect and better trained than Alad's mercenaries could ever hope to be. The Corpus were not Orokin; even the long years had not seen them rise to the level of their predecessors.

What hope would there be for them when the Betrayers decided they wanted more than just nitain?

The yacht accelerated towards the Jovian Rail and disappeared into its glowing white heart. It was too much for Harr. By the time they'd reemerged at the edge of Mars, he'd fainted to the ground in a graceless heap, face-down in a glistening pool of bile.

There'd been something left in his stomach after all.

Xxxxxxxxxxxxx-O-xxxxxxxxxxxxX

-TRIVIA-

-o- "A Fata Morgana is an unusual and complex form of superior mirage that is seen in the narrow band right above the horizon. It is the Italian name for the Arthurian sorceress Morgan le Fay, from a belief that these mirages, often seen in the Strait of Messina, were fairy castles in the air or false land created by her witchcraft to lure sailors to their deaths."

-o- Alad's dewy, "poisonous" lotion smells like lily-of-the-valley.

The reason is simple: when I was about 16 or 17, I had to make a trip with an elderly neighbor who wouldn't shut up about her family's individual medical problems, like they were the hottest topic since sliced bread. Trapped next to her for over two hours round trip, I was forced to the suffer this riveting conversation in silence, abhorrently carsick and huffing the overwhelming stank of lily-of-the-valley oozing from her pores. That was years ago, and I still can't smell it without getting nauseated.

Additionally, lily-of-the-valley is a pretty, but extremely toxic plant that can be fatal to anyone who consumes its flowers, leaves, berries or roots. Within hours, symptoms can include rash and hives, blurry vision, dilated pupils, vomiting, seizures, and abnormal heart rhythm – ultimately leading to death. It is especially poisonous to children.

-o- Our word "coffee" originates from the Italian caffè, which in turn comes from the original Turkish pronunciation of kahve or kahveh. Alad literally offered the Director a cup of coffee.

-o- Description of Saryn's unfortunate victims comes from Rotaken's gory, unsettlingly beautiful picture of her on Deviant Art. (Search the username!)