1045 Hours UTC, 21 September 2552 (Military Calendar)/
Sol System, Earth, UNSC Science Outpost 01A-77

Bad Day Just Got Worse

Seven days after arriving at this outpost, CWO5 Fontaine ventured beneath the surface for the first time, hoping for some kind of respite or at least something that would take his mind off the current ordeal topside.

The labyrinthine topology of the sub-complexes was intricate and extensive, Rion could only assume. ports or something to get a line out. Up ahead was a T-junction, left or right. He glanced each direction. One side stretched out very far and was oddly barren of activity. The other way had many office doors stemming off either side, and was also a long hallway with no activity taking place. He headed that direction, peering to the sides as he walked. He wasn't going to risk intruding on someone else's space, but luckily found the words CALL CENTER in bold red stenciling on another door a few more paces ahead.

Inside were small phone booths. The place was silent with no one occupying the room now but him.

He dialed the numbers and waited a for a few rings.

A familiar voice answered, "Hello."

"Hey, it's me."

"Rion. How are you?"

"Doing alright. Same old."

"Me and Jane checked on your mother today and she's fine."

"Her appetite getting any better?"

"Yes, actually it's doing very well. She seems more upbeat and talkative. Even the dogs started playing again."

"That's great."

"Yeah. So, what else? Everything okay at work?"

"Sure."

"And you're keeping in shape? Eating healthy?"

"Yeah, you know me. And the food here is decent."

"Everything's in the plus column?"

"As far as I can tell. Why?"

"You sound...I don't know...drained."

"Yeah, work lately is draining. Some of the stuff I'm working on is giving me trouble, but I just have to keep working at it."

"Anything else?"

"Well..."

"C'mon, Rion, say it."

"They're extending me."

"Wow, again?"

"Yeah, I was told the first freaking day too."

"How much longer this time?"

"I don't know. Nobody's saying much, and I can't get in touch with anyone back at my unit. At least, not yet. I'm sure the answers will come soon."

"Alright, well, just keep your head low and your spirits high. It's only temporary, right?"

"Yep. Okay, I'm gonna give it another try and see if I can make some progress."

"Alright. Audrey says hello. Love you. Be safe."

"Love you back. Tell Audrey to do her homework. See you both soon."

1530 Hours UTC

At the rooftop, Fontaine frowned at the old troposcatter terminal and thought about planting his steel-toed boot in it.

All previous attempts at troubleshooting the antiquated equipment failed over the recent days. He disrobed his camouflaged overshirt and threw it inside the tent, wiping the sweat off his brow as he pondered further. He stared at it, hoping the answer would just jump out at him. The technical literature pertaining to this thing had been downloaded and was now stored on his datapad, also inside the tent. He'd read through the chapter detailing the OEM-recommended troubleshooting steps twice in the span of one hour just to make sure he was playing it by the book before resorting to unsanctioned methods.

"This is going nowhere."

He checked his timepiece and frowned again. So consumed by this last bout of troubleshooting, he'd lost track of time, blew right past his lunch break.

Every other terminal was all in the green according to their readouts, but the olive-drab hunk of metal looked brick-shaped and was about as useful as one at the present. They usually came with an attachable shelter that provided modest space and climate control for those long stints wherever the operator found themselves. This was just the bare-bones version. He scanned the reflector panels on top of the large chassis, wondering if they were perhaps pointed incorrectly. He withdrew a compass and an inclinometer from both of his cargo pockets, checking to make sure the sporadic wind gusts hadn't swept the dish off its azimuth when he wasn't looking. No, it was on-target. Everything was as it should be.

He entered the tent once more, scooping the datapad off the top of the cot he'd slept on. He navigated to the Telecommunication Access Link Key and consulted the pre-established mission parameters. Among the pertinent details of geo-location of the ground station and modulation schemes and bandwidth allocations, sure enough the orders mandated an initial access window with this quirky old piece of equipment being first in line, no other.

"Why?" he mumbled spitefully.

The Chief sighed, zipped up the lining of the ops tent and marched to the elevator. His appetite was raging after all the expenditure of energy into the downed equipment.

Despite his regular attempts at resurrecting this asset, he had already settled into a predictable routine. On his way to the cafeteria below-ground, he changed and hung up the combat fatigues in his lower-level sleeping tent, now wearing a set of civilian clothes he usually had set aside for the last day of deployments. The days which afforded him a little sightseeing in some nearby city before traveling onto the next mission. But it seemed this entire area was off the grid to begin with, the bustle here certainly more informal than most places he'd ventured to on official business. And almost everyone was civilian. He recalled seeing one, maybe two UNSC personnel here when he first arrived. That was it.

The box car door split in half with a chime. The way in front was low-vaulted, a long but wide corridor. The off-white walls were tiled in a large checkerboard fashion and the floors were darkly carpeted. Somewhere up ahead in the brightly-lit hallway was the cafeteria. Savory scents wafted in and out as patrons came and went through the portico. Once inside, he raised a brow at the enormity of it.

The cafeteria was a large and high-vaulted place and seemed able to accommodate more than a hundred patrons at once. Baskets of local and exotic flora hung at the perimeter near bench tables. The twin buffet aisles were long and ran sinusoidal rather than straight up and down the length of the establishment. The bright colored vegetables suggested they were fresh from a distance. The greens looked crisp and he could smell the olive oil emanating from where on-site chefs worked a pasta bar.

He proceeded to a turnstile and brushed past it and into the line, grabbing silverware and a tray.

Once laden with his meal, he moseyed with the flow of people to the expanse of tables. He looked around before he found a place, noting that there were no cashiers.

"Yep, believe it or not there is such a thing as a free meal."

Rion wheeled around slowly to find a man wearing a white lab coat smiling at him through a pair of auto-tinting smartglasses.

"Good thing because my hunger's twice as big as my wages at this point."

"Then you should have sought a full commission a long time ago, Chief." He looked Fontaine up and down. "We heard you were coming here. So, you're our new comms guru of last resort."

"Binary bloodhound. Boolean brilliance."

"Or just a two-bit technician."

"Hey, watch your syntax or I'll have you pay your sin tax."

"Glad you're here." The civilian smiled. "You know, in case the shit hits the doomsday fan."

"Doubt it'll ever come to that. Not as long as Reach stands in the way. Born and raised on Earth myself, so it sort of feels like home. Rion Fontaine," he said, placing his tray down at the closest table, sliding onto a seat, "and you are?"

"Max Schweinfurt." He replied, situating himself in the seat across.

"Son of Otto Schweinfurt?"

"Yes. How'd you know that?"

"I worked with your father a few years ago. I was his aide when he was testing a batch of sigma-summing circuits for use on these multiplexers that we were going to pair with the newest diode-pumped LASER modules. Actually, aiding him was an overstatement. He did all the hard work. I mostly fetched him design specs of the components we were after."

"Small world. When'd you get here?"

"Few days ago. The fourteenth, I think."

"Where on Earth are you from?"

"Florida. You?"

"Reach is my home."

They both shook hands.

Rion began a silent saying-of-grace to himself while Max drank some water.

"How do you like it here so far?" Max asked him.

"Nice place," replied the Chief Warrant Officer, nodding appreciatively, "it's like you don't even know you're underground half the time."

"Yes, we are kind of spoiled here."

"I can see that. Place seems pretty relaxed. Everyone gets along. Not bad."

"And we like to keep it that way. Most of us are engineers and scientists so we all kind of speak the same lingo. As long as we work hard and things get done, the military bosses hardly need to come out this way."

"Sounds like a strategy."

"The location is pretty isolated, so I think they'd rather not have to visit here anyways, which works out well for everyone."

"So what is it you do?"

"I'm a photonics engineer. I designed and implemented the entire fiber optic communications infrastructure for the subterranean facilities."

"That's putting it…lightly."

"I see you've been around."

"And it seems like the apple doesn't fall very far from the tree. You followed in your Father's footsteps. So, they keep you busy down here?"

"Always busy down here." He swallowed a gulp of water. "At least as long as I can remember. Speaking of which…How's your job going so far? Keeping yourself busy at the surface?"

"Doin' it 'till my giga hurts."

"Some of the others said you were living up there. That true?"

"Yeah, the parking garage. Hell of a mountain view up there."

"Can we offer you a room down here out of the elements?"

"Appreciate the offer, but all the terminals are at the rooftop. I'll have to bed down up there until I can get all my orderwires up and running."

"I see. Well, how are your accommodations up there?"

"Not the coziest, but I've got a roof over my head. Climate controlled tent, spacious enough."

"Will you need to stay up there permanently? I wouldn't think you'd have to live in that parking garage the whole time."

"I only need to stay with the terminals when the cryptographics are operating. Other than that…"

The Chief Warrant Officer hurriedly checked his wristwatch, realizing he'd fall further behind schedule if he took his time and enjoyed his food. He began to talk faster between bites. "Level twelve suits my fancy. Cooler down there than on the roof but still keeps me close enough to the action."

"You know we've got a lot of good fast food items here that you can get to-go. If you need to get back to work, I understand."

Rion shifted uneasily and pinched at his chin. "Eh, you know, it's just I'm having some trouble with this old troposcatter terminal. It's down-hard right now. Trying to figure out what it is, but the more I troubleshoot the more it just pisses me off."

"That's UHF band, I believe."

"Yeah, high-powered sub-microwaves."

"Ran through any in-house diagnostics yet?"

"Yeah, everything checks out fine. When I try to normal-thru to the other end, everything craps out."

"What happens exactly?"

"All kinds of weird things. First time I had it transmitting, the noise floor rose up to where I couldn't make out anything but nonsense on a spectrum analyzer. Second time, only one-half of it rose up on a lower sideband of my carrier, but I still couldn't get data across uncorrupted. And it's never the same exact symptoms, either. It's always changing."

"And all your equipment passes loopback testing?"

"Yeah, every single one of them. I went so far as to hook an oscilloscope up to the AGC circuits. Totally stable."

"Strange. It should be working."

"That's what I said too. This is the simplest piece of equipment I've ever seen, but it's stubborn as a damned snail! It's just a tropo shot to the ONI Alpha Site. Nothing fancy. Must be some kind of interference but I never find any when I break out a Watt Sniffer."

"Is any of your equipment out of calibration?"

"ROM monitors say they were all cal'd less than two weeks ago. I don't know else to do at this point. I've tried everything."

"So all baseband circuitry and your intermediate-frequency chain is green, but it's when you actively transmit that you get all this interference?"

"Exactly."

"Narrowband and modulated?"

"Doesn't matter."

"It's got to be your main amplifier then. Maybe some bleed-over."

"I don't think so because I did a translator loopback after the klystron, and that test was green too."

"Any cloud cover out there?"

"Plenty lately, but it wouldn't matter. I'm pushing two kilowatts which would be enough energy to make a small patch of that cloud cover turn into nothing but rain at the frequencies I'm using."

"That's something you've got going on there."

"Yeah, you're telling me. I was supposed to report in for a status update. They're not gonna be happy with this."

"I feel your pain. I could send one of our technicians your way to see if he can confirm it with his own equipment. Maybe he can be of some help to you out there."

"I appreciate the offer, but I think I'll take one more stab at it."

"Let me know how it turns out."

"Sure thing. Can't believe this stupid thing ain't working."

"Don't worry." the engineer said with a smile. "Even the best of us have a bad day once in a while." He wiped his hands with a napkin and stood up. "I'm sure it'll all work itself out soon."

The man started to walk off, then stopped and turned.

"Why tropospheric scatter? If you don't mind me asking."

"Immune to the effects of jamming and radiation, among other things. Built to outlast hell."

1745 Hours UTC

Rion found himself meandering one of the hallways not too far from the cafeteria. He felt sluggish, assuming he'd eaten too fast. The hallways were plain and simple, no picture frames or bulletin boards anywhere in sight. It was barren except for the people. He then realized this was an outpost with scientific and engineering activity taking place, which meant all their business occurred away from the places like cafeterias and recreation centers. He took his time and walked slowly and leisurely, off-handedly contemplating what his next steps would be at the rooftop. The day was already more than halfway over, he had no clear way forward in his efforts, and he'd already missed the initial access window. Higher ups would get curious if they weren't already. This wasn't supposed to happen. Fontaine was the subject matter expert in deployable telecommunications. If anything, Rion felt he had a reputation to maintain.

"Hell with it." Fontaine said to himself, quickening his steps.

He found a group of local personnel conversing off a tributary to the main artery he currently walked.

"Excuse me, where's the closest phone I could use?"

"Head to the rec center." one of them replied. "That's your best bet."

"Thanks." Rion sped off.

1800 Hours UTC

"Sir, this is Chief Fontaine. I have a sit-rep."

Rion cupped the phone to his ear as a basketball match was currently in-progress over his shoulder.

"Chief," replied his commanding officer, a full-bird colonel, "is there something wrong? Why aren't you using one of the authorized circuits?"

"Sir, there's a problem with tropo. We'll need a replacement unit out here."

"Roger, Chief, if you say so. We'll do what we can to get you taken care of. Just bear in mind that the only other tropo terminal on Earth we know of is owned by a combat unit, and they've always been reluctant to loan it out to anyone. Other than that, what about everything else?"

"The rest is all green as far as I can see."

"Great. Can you access the secure grid with some alternate terminal? I would like to speak with you on the high side as soon as possible."

"Sure, I can have the SATCOM go hot within half an hour."

"Alright, then I'll see you in half an hour. If you encounter further problems, keep your terminals receive-locked to the constellation and monitor them very closely."

The line went dead.

The Chief frowned and hung up the phone. Usually, the C.O. wasn't so terse, at least never with him.

Rion shook off the abrupt ending to the conversation and once again walked briskly on his way through the main aisles of the interconnecting sub-complexes and toward the elevator that would lead him to the parking garage.

1820 Hours UTC

Rion passed up the cafeteria off to his right and spotted the main entryway up ahead. Just an elevator to the surface, a short trek across a sand-covered walkway, then one more elevator to the top of the garage. He was suddenly halted in mid-stride by Max, the engineer, who lunged into view from a side corridor.

"This is you!" Max held an issue of Signal Magazine aloft, nearly just off Rion's nose. There he was, CWO2 Fontaine, thirteen years ago, posing in front of a datacenter he'd frequented at the Reach Military Complex while stationed there. The headline read: LEADING THE FRONT LINES FROM HQ.

He took about a five-second gander at the image, realized just how much his physical appearance changed since then. The smooth face slightly weathered from all his years of exposure to sunlight and the cheekbones had hardened. His blonde hair was now a muted-yellow, not as thick or strong as it used to be. But Fontaine only briefly engaged in this self-examination. He never considered himself dapper or photogenic or even all that appealing to anyone else. He never once took a selfie. If anything, he knew his wife adored his rugged features—the square jaw and straight nose. The only compliments he ever remembered a woman paying him was 'handsome' and 'respectful'.

Fontaine remembered the article. The story featured his unit's efforts to roll out a back-end server cluster that would control storage arrays for the bulk of the UNSC's galaxy-wide slipspace communications infrastructure. It also functioned as the Grand Central Station for FTL datagram multiplexing as the probes passed by other slipspace sensor nodes. It was the UNSC's upgrade solution for a more efficient routing and archival of emergency action messages between colonies and forward intel units.

"That's me." Rion smiled, tilting forward so as to suggest the journey topside wasn't a trivial one.

"You helped build the Slipspace Probe Area Network."

"Yes." Rion began to walk slowly. Max followed along at his side. "That was before my advanced degree studies, mind you. I was just a technician. All they had junior warrant officers doing back then was just systems administration."

"I see. Hey, I could give you a tour of the place. Interested?"

"Sounds good. I'll stop by a little later. The bosses are hailing."

Fontaine paced away.

"Alright, hope to see you soon! Are you still having those issues up there?"

1845 Hours UTC

Rion strolled up to the SATCOM terminal and flipped a breaker switch. The solid-state amplifier began to energize.

An internal fan instantly spooled and began moving air through gills on the exterior of the amplifier's plenum, which clung to the dish's wide pedestal with barbed, metal claws. In this hour of twilight, he paused momentarily and turned toward the Western horizon for an inspiring view. Unfortunately, Kilimanjaro was fully obscured by reddened puffs of low-hanging clouds, which seemed to darken the entire land more quickly than usual for this time of evening.

He entered the tent and logged into the terminal's orderwire console and issued the command for it to start transmitting. A second later, he received a bright-red error prompt. "Crap."

Rion walked outside for a brief visual inspection. In an instant, he could see that there was nothing out of spec.

"This just ain't my day."

A colonel was expecting his call on a secure link, which meant his situation was important and urgent.

Suddenly, a shuffling of footsteps could be heard across the way. The Chief wheeled around to see some guy in jeans and a collared shirt stepping out of the elevator. He walked steadily closer with a toolbox held at one side. Upon him veering nearer, the embroidery could be seen on the man's shirt.

IRIS Support Services

The Chief glanced rearward and made sure no classified hardware was visible, then sidestepped to the tent's exterior flap and zipped it closed.

"Howdy, sir." the man said.

Fontaine gaited closer and nodded. "Can I help you?"

"Max sent me up here saying you had some issue with one of your communication terminals. Which one is it?" He craned his neck to the side, looking beyond the Marine.

"It's that old behemoth over there." he pointed. "Can't get it to transmit properly."

"Alright, I'll hop on over there and take a look." The technician scurried in that direction.

"I'll be here." said Fontaine, returning to the tent to pickup up the orderwire's GUI.

The Chief tried to get the SATCOM to transmit again to no avail. He ran an internal diagnostic and within a few seconds it registered fine. He configured a cable loopback on the MODEM resting on a table inside his tent and rigged up a bit test set as well, interfacing the external equipment to the MODEM with a data cable. It, too, reported a flawless result within less than a minute.

"Well then what the hell?!" he shouted to himself inside the thin, tarp confines.

Rion broke out the spectrum analyzer again from inside another one of the many rugged transit cases and began connecting the cables to their designated ports on the terminal, hoping to troubleshoot it with better results than he obtained with the troposcatter hardware that he'd come to know inside-and-out these last few days.

His jaw was clenched the whole time while he finalized the test preparations.

Again, he activated a transmit command, this time with a steady eye on the display screen of the spectrum analyzer. With astonishment, he observed the exact same symptoms the nearby tropo terminal had been exhibiting.

"This is not a coincidence." he mumbled.

"Sir?" the technician beckoned from outside.

Rion stepped out and saw the man shaking his head where he knelt next to the tropo.

The Chief sighed and sauntered across the rooftop toward him.

The technician bit his lower lip and shrugged. "Looks like I did all I could here." He began collecting his items and stowing them inside the toolcase. "I hooked a dummy-load to the aperture and there's something wrong whenever it tries to radiate. All I get on the spec-an is noise. High-amplitude noise. Maybe it's a factory defect. That'd be my guess."

"Well, I appreciate the assistance, sir." Rion replied.

The young tech's next response was uttered absentmindedly as he caught sight of the X-ray LASER perched atop the dead-center of the expanse. "Yeah, it's no…no…problem. Hey…"

Fontaine had a keen eye on him and was about to turn the man away to escort him downward, but the device itself wasn't classified per se; it was only the combination of the Chief's key and the device together that processed any highly-sensitive information. Without one or the other, either item was about as useful as a paperweight. The technician continued to stare at the long, cylindrical body of it, saying, "Wow, is that one of those point-to-point LASER feeds?"

"Yes." he replied. "Next-gen model."

"Okay if I touch?"

"I don't mind."

The technician set his toolbox down again and gaited over to it. "This is some super-high-speed stuff." he said, running his fingertips over the comb-like flutings of the heatsinks. "Does it work well? Like, is it fast?"

"As lightening, so I'm told."

"Never used it before?"

"Not yet."

The civilian nodded. "Must be nice to get to play with all this cool stuff, though." He looked around the site slowly.

"It is, but not so much the LASER."

"Why's that?" the tech asked skeptically. "That thing is awesome."

"Can't just fire it up on a whim. You usually need prior authorization. It can go up to two-hundred watts on full gain so they hold our hands throughout the entire access sequence. I'll probably never get to see it in action."

"Too bad, sir. Well, sorry I couldn't help you out at all with the tropo. If it were me, I'd just throw the damned thing in the compactor, but good luck with it anyways."

The technician turned away toward the elevator, pausing briefly as he bent forward to scoop his toolbox off the ground.

The Chief Warrant tracked his movement until he stepped into the elevator and the doors slid shut.

Rion was out of options.

Or was he…

Rion removed his cap and threw it to the chair, then looked to the X-ray LASER. Where the old tropo shots were effective with their brutish, high-power hipfire methods, LASER-based communications were pinpoint-accurate and blazingly fast in terms of data rates. Much easier to operate too. He had minimal training on the ONI gear, but had to try something.

Stakes that the infrastructure setup team drove into the rooftop earlier had not budged at all. The attached metal tethers held the central pedestal taught in the middle. None of the gusts had fazed their emplacements. Worm gears near the anchors adjusted the tension on the pedestal, the single-use tethers stretched to their yield strength and not allowing the terminal's base even a millimeter of movement. The diode's servo motors continually adjusted the aperture's look angle in accordance with the ephemeris outputs of a small microwave relay nearby. The geo-positional coordinates were cast down to all users via wide-area-beam transponders from a satellite constellation high above. The diode was always moving, in theory, making imperceptible corrections in order to maintain the most accurate aim and the strongest signal at all times.

He glanced to the sky with a grimace. Could this have been the root cause of all the problems he experienced thus far? He wasn't sure, but he would find out in a moment.

"Alright, you don't want to play nice? Well, then I'll just punch a hole right through you."

He bent down to the base of the diode and slid back a clear safety cover, revealing the main input power relay. He jabbed the backlit button and his action momentarily dimmed the pole lamps surrounding his work site. A nearby capacitance fusion coil instantly compensated for the ripple.

Rion backed away and reached inside another transit case, retrieving from the internal foam liner a large pair of glasses. He donned the ocular transducers, activated them with a turn of a knob mounted atop one of the ear stems. The heavily-tinted lenses obscured everything until charge-coupled devices inside whined to life. The display flickered once before gradually brightening. After a brief POST routine and some fast-scrolling text, he configured maximum attenuation as he swiveled about to face the LASER diode. In real-time, the AN/PEC-1B Wavelength Conditioning Kit (known in ONI inner circles as The WaCK) would convert the extremely-high-energy emission into something he could see with his own two eyes for visual confirmation.

Currently, he could see a faint ray which the false-color display of the goggles had tinged a dull-red for him. He toggled the color to green, the most easily receptive to human eyesight. Brighter and clearer now, he slowly dialed out more attenuation until it was luminous enough not to induce discomfort. It was a very pure 540-nanometer wavelength as denoted in one corner of the display. Rion couldn't help but follow its vector skyward. The ray was straight and pierced right through the clouds. Of course, Rion couldn't see anything beyond that layer of the sky, but this exciting display continued to steal his attention, betraying the urgency of his situation. Though propagating in wavelengths invisible to human eyesight, the LASER light was surely the brightest thing in the solar system right now.

Visual confirmation was unmistakable: the light source was correctly calibrated right out of the box as the goggle's in-built diagnostics confirmed this not an instant later. He could see tiny motes of dust suspended in the beam flicker and flash as they rode in and out among the prevailing winds. Instantly, another beam of light appeared, seeming to occupy the same space as the one he just activated. Of course, that was the return beam originating from the spacecraft in geostationary orbit, now colored a polar-opposite red.

Bi-directional communications was now established. The distant-end (the ONI Alpha Site) had received Fontaine's signal, and now they were transmitting back. Out of curiosity, Rion glanced toward the far-East and could see an identical red beam angled sky-high, the brightness of it able to rival broad daylight itself were it still light out. He grinned knowing that only he and maybe one other on this planet could see what was taking place this calm, ordinary night. He deactivated the false-color image and the beam in the far distance instantly vanished. He studied his equipment again.

The fiber optic cable snaking away from the end of the diode was plugged into another hand-held console just a few meters away. Fontaine walked over to it and woke up the operating system, resting the discarded WaCK on top of a transit case. Mounted on the largest side of this other console was a pair of eye cups. He removed their dust cover and pressed a switch to begin a software program. He gazed inward with wide eyes, the retina scan instantly verifying his identity. He flipped the device over, inspecting a metal tag that was TIG-welded to its chassis. There, stenciled on top was the device's serial number and another pair of alphanumeric sets denoting login and password credentials. He memorized them instantly.

Flipping the device over again to show the touch display and eyecups, he typed in the characters. The LASER beam modulated his data and sent it skyward. Another instant and the program revealed he was authenticated and authorized to proceed further into ONI's database. The banner of this current image depicted the ONI logo, that proud bird of prey perched atop the all-seeing eye. Nearby was Rion's rank and credentialing, thumbnail images of his biometrics, and a list of open tasks coming from the central server, but something else caught his attention immediately.

Near the top was a flashing sub-banner, a linked message. He stared at it and blinked twice, the browser program navigating to a new page.

Taking up all the space on-screen was a bold-red three-letter acronym: ENM

"Emergency Notification Message." he mumbled to himself. Operators were required to open any ENM that displayed itself on the portal, no matter what their current circumstances were at the time. All ONI personnel, from field agents to the head of Section III, literally had to drop what they were doing and acknowledge these urgent message identifiers. "This better be good."

It stopped flashing a few seconds later and loaded another program. The lone progress bar stalled at first, so the Chief removed his face from the eyecups and looked around, making sure no one else occupied the rooftop. After a few more seconds, the loader finished very quickly, the message likely consisting of mostly text and very little multimedia. It chimed to seize his attention and stopped chiming once Rion looked down into it again, pressing the gasket against his facial features. The resolution instantly calibrated to his eyesight and sharpened to his liking. What he saw was a heavily-coded message that could only be deciphered with a specific PKI credential, one that only equally-specific agents of ONI possessed. On a sidereel of the display, the transcript snippet denoted an asymmetric encryption algorithm that was hashed in what amounted to a 16-round quantum key whose modulus measured in the tenths of thousands of bits.

"What?"

The tenured Chief Warrant Officer had never seen or heard of this level of encryption. He already knew that any text sent along in ENM formats were actually aggregated images composed of nano-pixels, each of them many times smaller than the width of a human hair. This meant that the viewer needed a special device such as the one Rion currently had in order just to correctly display everything. Even further, the algorithm used to encrypt the resultant image was based off the composition of the nano-pixels themselves, making it impossible to reverse-decrypt a message if some unauthorized person was able to intercept the transmission, and that very transmission was immensely-coded to begin with. Such robust, layered safeguards made him shift his hunched-over stance and squint harder as he further scrutinized the message header.

He found the sender's address which was also hashed, as well as the recipients' addresses, which then made his eyes go wide.

There, in plain text was the unmistakable broadcast address of all Fs in hexadecimal format: an all-hands communiqué directed at every single node the UNSC currently had in existence, galaxy-wide.

Rion backed away from the terminal and fished his cargo pocket for a cigarette. He shakily rubbed a finger against the activation strip and began puffing. After the first hit of nicotine, he closed his eyes and breathed as deeply and steadily as he could, realizing his heart was pounding. He could hear the rhythmic thump in between his ears.

Another moment, he threw the cigarette butt to the ground and lunged inward again, working up the courage to finish reading.

Abetting his worst fear was another block of text displaying the code word: BLOODY ARROW.

There was no mistaking what this was.

Before generating the command for the machine to insert the private key into the infrastructure and start decryption, he closed his eyes once more.

He stabbed the switch and opened his eyes.

A torrent of prime numbers propagated down the length of the display, revealing the contents in near-real-time. In a few seconds, he saw the awful truth. It was confirmed. Reach was gone. That left only Earth in the immediate vicinity of whatever Covenant force just destroyed the last remaining stronghold of the military.

Chief Warrant Officer Rion Fontaine tossed all his equipment inside the tent and sprinted toward the elevator.