A/N: Hello! Let me preface by saying that my writing sucks. You're free to tell me that again (no hard feelings, and criticism of all kinds is welcome) but if you feel like my stories have wasted your time, don't say I didn't warn you!

Chapter 1: Wait, You Broke the What Now?

I ran my thumb over the smooth angles of the Hexis Medallion, toying with the thing. It sat heavy in my hand.

"It is high time that I turn myself to greater pursuits," I said grandly, pre-empting any argument. "There is no need to factor the Captain into my plans for she will be cut down like all the rest, soon enough."

That was a lie, of course. Grineer Captain Sukk Kokk had been a thorn in my side for many months now, turning up to embarrass me with alarming frequency. My Orbiter was supposed to be nigh impossible to track, so I wasn't sure how she was doing it. The clone woman had once been a Lieutenant under the infamously disgraced General Vor, and was proving to be troublingly capable.

If only she had been a smidgen more like her erstwhile superior. It was a little before my time, but apparently he had been demoted for his incompetence and then unceremoniously killed. That wasn't to say that I wanted a bungler like him for a rival, but was it too much to ask for a happy medium?

Caius gave me a look I couldn't interpret, then silently turned away from me.

"You doubt me?" I pressed. Whatever I knew to be true of my own situation, I had been a Sage in the old empire. I deserved to be left with a little face.

Caius gave me no response and stared meditatively into the void of space. Ah, pretending to meditate to avoid admitting a loss? I had to admit, it rankled me to be on the receiving end. Only I was allowed that strategy.

"Fine then. It is clear to me now that you lack the vision to understand," I said coolly. I turned away from him and left him to his devices. Whatever it was that he did during the day. Being content with his lot in life, probably.

"Having another chat with Caius, Operator?"

Despite the poor mood Caius had left me in, I perked up a little at the voice.

"Yuya! Are your calculations already complete?"

It was a pleasant surprise. My ship Cephalon was much better company than Caius even on her worst days, so it would be nice to have her with me until we made the jump.

"Fail to come to an understanding?" she asked.

"Does anyone truly understand each other in this lonely universe?" I deflected.

"You've been reading too many of those detective stories," Yuya said dryly.

"Not nearly as often as I'd like."

It would be difficult to overstate how exceptionally boring trips between planets were. They took much too much time to be waiting in silence but were paradoxically too short to really do anything else. I'd tried reading fiction a few times since my awakening on Lua but we were always nearing our destination any time I was starting to get engrossed.

That just left fiddling with curios.

For all the curiosities that I had purchased from merchants and peddlers, the life of a Tenno involved a lot of travelling. Few purchases remained novel for as long as I needed them to be.

When Caius wasn't up for conversation, I would thus be forced to distract myself with trinkets I had long grown bored of, or alternatively with tuning my shawzin. I swear I would actually learn to play the thing, one day. Someday.

"To answer the question, the Orbiter is ready to move," she confirmed. "Corpus rail control have initiated Solar Rail charge and the engines and back-up generators are saturating with Void energy. As usual, we'll uncloak and jump through at twenty percent saturation."

"Good." I nodded. "I hate travelling."

"It's only forty minutes."

If Yuya had a mouth, I was certain she would be smiling.

"It's forty minutes too long," I corrected her. Fifteen minutes of silent flight from Venus to the rails. Ten minutes of sitting hidden in the Void, twiddling my fingers waiting for rail control to power up the rails. Fifteen minutes more of silent flight from the rails to Earth.

"We're already using public jump points at your insistence, Operator. Most Tenno don't complain about using the much safer, dedicated Tenno rails," she noted.

"Yes, well, I'm sure the other ship Cephalons talk to their Operators while they pilot," I retorted.

It was a little much for a ship Cephalon to dedicate her full focus to her navigational duties when a nav module sufficed for everyone else. I was touched, of course, that she was so concerned about my safety, but honestly, what were the chances that anything could possibly go wrong? We'd made the rounds a thousand times since I'd left my cryopod on Lua. Not once had the Orbiter deviated so much as a thousandth of a degree from our estimated flight path.

"If we used the hidden rails, you'd have enough time to read those stories you enjoy so much."

"We've been over this, Yuya. With how long it takes to get to those blasted rails, I would be out of novels to read within the year."

"Considering the annual output in Corpus space, I very much doubt that."

"I have a very refined taste," I replied. "Not every Sinannian jumpsuit ripper will catch my eye."

Travel through realspace was by its very nature slow, so I shunned the hidden Tenno rails that so many of my compatriots travelled by. It wasn't easy hiding a Solar Rail, even a tiny one dedicated to Tenno use. Unlike our Orbiters, or the Dojos we had constructed, by its very nature a Solar Rail could not be cloaked in the Void.

It was therefore by necessity that the Tenno rails were placed much farther out into space than the public jump points now controlled by the Corpus and the Grineer. Far enough out that any chance of bumping into one by accident was a statistical impossibility.

Travelling through the faction-held rails was a little more dangerous, perhaps, since we skipped all the safeties and people really liked to shoot at us. But it saved me a lot of time. I couldn't imagine flying six hours out from planetary orbit every time I wanted to so much as travel across the system.

I longed for the day I could simply travel through space by Railjack again, but as far as anyone knew, Mara owned the sole surviving specimen. When we parted on Venus a few hours ago, she just shot off into the Void to investigate that distress signal from Deimos. Lucky her.

I was still sitting here waiting for the blasted Solar Rail to power up.

"Let us end that topic there," I said, not wanting this to descend into the familiar argument. As soon as the Solar Rail was sufficiently saturated with energy, we would be uncloaking and Void-jumping to the Earth rail, and then she would be back to ignoring me in favour of navigating to the planet proper.

I would have rather not spent the twenty minute flight stewing over our disagreements on what constituted acceptable transit time.

"To return to the previous question, yes, I was having a chat with Caius."

Knowing that Yuya could see me from anywhere in the room, I began to pace about the length of my personal quarters.

"I was a Tenno Sage, you know?"

"I know," she replied. "I remember."

"It just feels like I'm not being utilised to the best of my potential." I struggled for a moment to find the right words. Yuya said nothing and waited patiently for me to speak. "The slaves formed an Empire."

Yuya said nothing.

"The slave clones formed an empire," I repeated, feeling more sure of my words now. "The Corpus have evolved from a small merchant cult to a religious theocracy that controls half the system. How have the Tenno evolved?"

"You haven't," Yuya said, knowing that was the answer I was prompting for.

"I haven't. The Orokin decided that we were to be their blade and gun. The Lotus used us as the same to execute her will. Both are gone now, but here we are, clinging to the remnants of her network, doing our best to continue as always," I said, gesturing vaguely into the air. "Are we to stay the same, forever unchanging?"

When Yuya replied this time, it wasn't the perfunctory, obliging answer. These were her words.

"You aren't the same," she said dryly. "The Tenno are adopting stances, taking sides. You almost joined the Arbiters of Hexis just last week."

"And it was a good thing that I didn't, because I would just be running errands for them instead," I retorted. The Arbiters had some good ideas, but clearly they lacked the imagination to do anything except prod Tenno into doing what they always had. I was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that they weren't simply another group trying to use me, but clearly they could do with having someone a little sharper in charge.

"We could be doing more. What if we—We could use Kuva to install a puppet on the Corpus Board of Executives!"

"Leaving aside all the other problems—"

"What other problems?"

"—could you even get close?" Yuya asked sceptically.

"Well I—No," I admitted. "But that was simply an example! There must be somewhere else that I could be better applied than assaulting the odd ship here and there like an attack dog!"

I almost stomped to punctuate my exclamation, but thought better of it.

"The Sentients are returning," Yuya said quietly.

"I know. But we'll beat them back just like last time, right?"

"We will."

I gave the syndicate medallion in my hand another glance while a silence descended between us.

Yuya was the first to speak.

"What are you going to do once the System settles down? Maybe write the detective stories this time?"

I could hear the teasing lilt in her modulated voice, but there wasn't any malice in it. There never was. So when I turned the corners of my lips downwards, as usual I wasn't truly upset. Still, teasing was teasing. I couldn't just accept it; it was a matter of principle.

"Hmph. I was thinking that perhaps I could be a trader. I've seen plenty of deals, merchant and smuggler alike. I'd like to think that I could be a fair hand at negotiating."

"You, Operator?"

All right. Maybe I was a little upset.

"If the deal goes sour, I can always shoot them," I said, deadpan.

Yuya hummed noncommittally.

"The rail is at twenty percent. Ready to uncloak."

I nodded.

"Do it."

It didn't take long for the Orbiter to go from motionless to surging through space. I could hear Corpus chatter on the comms. Although there was no discernable difference from where I stood inside the Orbiter, I knew that the Void cloak that hid us from their eyes must have dropped, revealing us to everyone from the merchant frigates in the transport convoy to the Corpus guarding the rail.

They wouldn't catch us. We were fast approaching the glowing mass of the Solar Rail now.

When I looked out the window, I could see proxy fighters launching from Corpus stanchions like a swarm of insects, but it was too late.

The Solar Rail was responding to our Orbiter and firing.

"Wait. The Solar Rail is losing power!"

"What?" I asked, just as we were sent through the Void.

The next thing I knew, the contents of my personal quarters were being thrown wildly across the room. I shielded my face from a flying statuette while I clung to a railing for stability. What on earth was going on here? Were the inertial cancellers malfunctioning?!

By chance I glanced out the window. That was not Venus. At least we seemed to have made it to Earth. Only it was a lot closer to us than it should have been.

"The Void energy—! Everything but auxiliary generators are failing. Propulsion systems are stalling," came Yuya's harried voice. "We're free-falling through the Troposphere. Operator! I don't have time to diagnose. I'm rerouting as much power to the engines as I can. You need to get the Transference Chamber as quick—"

My world flipped violently up and down as the walls around me seemed to spin uncontrollably. Clinging to the rails like a desperate virmink, I numbly registered klaxons that signified a hull breach before my hands inevitably slipped. My arms were raised defensively before I really knew what was happening, so it was my ulna that broke the glass.

I choked. Water was in my windpipes. I was inside my fish tank. Everything was spinning; one moment the coral was by my feet, and the next it was above my head.

From my subjective perspective, my entry hole was rotating on the spot. I only had to swim desperately forwards. That was my only saving grace.

I had only managed to get my head out of the water when the Orbiter jerked brutally again.

"Operator! Operator, you need to get up!"

I coughed weakly and blearily opened my eyes. It felt like my windpipes were burning all the way down into my lungs. Managing to roll onto my side, each wretched hacking cough sent water out of my system.

"What's—what's happening?" I wheezed.

Oh no.

I moaned.

Caius.

"No! Caius, no!"

He was absolutely still, and a bloody, mangled mess. These weren't the sort of injuries a mortus lungfish could survive. The lively eyes I had spent many a night glaring into were fixed blankly to a spot on the wall.

I had lost him.

"Damn it!" I shrieked in frustration.

I probably shouldn't have done so because it sent me into another paroxysm of coughing, interrupted only by infuriated sobs. My eyes and nose stung from the tank water. This was shaping up to be a horrendously bad day. I was going to murder whoever was responsible for this.

"What happened?" I asked.

"A Void-jump accident. When we exited the Void, the Orbiter was travelling obscenely quickly towards the surface of the Earth," Yuya grimly said. "The propulsion engine was non-functional; all of the Void energy just seemed to have dried up. I had to reroute energy from the auxiliary fusion generators just to stop us burning up like a meteor in atmosphere."

There wasn't a trace of the earlier levity in her voice

"The cloaking systems weren't even a consideration at that point. As we were coming down towards the surface, we were fired upon by AA guns. I did my best to avoid them with what little use I got out of the propulsors, but we took a glancing hit to the port side."

There was no shortage of Grineer anti-air guns on the Earth, but they hardly covered every inch of it. If we were shot down, then it would have been near a Grineer outpost. If we were still anywhere nearby, then I could only hope we had landed in the deep forest.

"Do you know where we are now, Yuya?"

The virtual window in my personal chambers was powered off, so rather than giving me any sort of clue as to where we were, all I was offered was the blank metal surface of the wall.

"Not exactly. Maybe somewhere in Asia. After we were hit in the port, I did my best to land us safely. There just wasn't enough time, and there wasn't enough energy being fed to the propulsion engines. When we landed, it was hard."

Yuya seemed to pause to choose her words.

"It looks like we've crashed through the surface into a system of subterranean tunnels. As far as I can tell, this isn't some underground facility, but flying out of here will be difficult regardless. Sensors are down as well, and the communications array was damaged in the crash. I damaged some of the fusion reactors trying to power the propulsors."

"Can we not do something about that?" I asked, rather concerned. The importance of the Strata Relay meant that there were probably other Tenno just orbiting the Earth today, but it wouldn't mean much if I couldn't get a request out for reinforcements.

"I'm still diagnosing. More urgently, we're under attack by robotics of an unknown make."

I rubbed my head while I tried to process everything I knew about the situation. We were underground. The Orbiter was designed for flying through the air. This was therefore less than ideal. Communications were not working properly, and the cause was yet unknown. Also, we were under attack? By unknown robotics?

Yuya continued, "I've deployed five MOA proxies for the time being, but they won't hold on their own. I can deploy more if we have to. How are you feeling, Operator?"

I groaned.

"As well as one possibly can feel after a hiccup like that."

"Are you injured?" she asked.

I gingerly rubbed my abused arm but ultimately shook my head.

"I'm fine. Ready to go, just a little bruising. Can you tell me anything more about the attackers?"

"Not much," she admitted. "I'm trying to get the sensors operational as quickly as I can, but with so little power available, I'll need to make significant changes before I have eyes out there. You need to be careful, Operator."

"All right," I conceded, before making my way towards the Transference Chamber. I hadn't taken more than three steps when Yuya stopped me.

"The Somatic Systems are down, Operator. You'll have to initiate Transference directly."

Right. Very well. To the arsenal then.

As I found out over the next few seconds, that was easier said than done. Because my Orbiter was still tilted at something like a 40 degree angle, actually getting to the arsenal was a bit of an adventure. The fact that I was still sodden from head to toe didn't make it any better. Why hadn't I taken up that merchant's discount on slip-proof flooring?

Urged on by muted clanging noises from outside, I stumbled my way to my destination as quickly as I could manage without risking a broken neck. It was with accomplished satisfaction that I slapped a hand on the console, bringing my Nyx out of stasis.

Filled with muted anticipation, I placed my hand against the cheek of my Nyx.

Oh.

That was... odd. Was this what it was like to transfer directly? I hadn't done it before, but if this sluggish feeling was the norm then I thought I was going to stick to the Somatic Link.

Staying in the Transference pod significantly reduced potential harm too.

I paused. Unless the Orbiter that housed it happened to get shot down by an AA gun out of the blue, of course.

Ah well, I could grumble about my situation later. For now there were things to kill.

Breaking into a run, I made for the port side of my Orbiter.

"Wait! Operator! Your Warfr—"

By the time I registered Yuya's surprised voice, I was already vaulting through the molten hole in the wall with a Soma assault rifle in hand. Time seemed to slow for me as I made a six metre drop into the outside darkness.

Dark cavern. Concrete chunks. Five MOA proxies, one disabled. An attacking force of twenty… rusted iron buckets of varying sizes? I clamped down on a flash of contempt as I twisted through the air. Aiming at the furthest robots, I pulled the trigger and was rewarded with the satisfying kick of the rifle against my hand. The muzzle flared, and four of the attackers fell bullet-ridden as my Soma rattled off in my hand. Their armour wasn't insurmountably thick, then.

Time seemed to speed up again as I completed my twirl and surged my glide systems with power. Nothing happened. I fell sprawling into a chaotic mess of robots, MOA and bucket alike. In the first confused instant I may have punched a few of my own MOAs, but within a heartbeat I had extricated myself sufficiently to gain purchase of the situation.

An iron bucket was rushing me from the left, while three larger ones came from behind me. Like whatever Yuya tried to tell me, I'd have to think about what just happened later.

With a flick of my arm, the long blade of my Nami Skyla cleaved the smallest form in twain. As its two halves clanked onto the dusty concrete beneath me, I stepped away from the oncoming attacks and spun to face them. Another swing of my arm saw a perfectly aligned blade parting an attacker in two. A pirouette between the axes of the two survivors later, and I was perfectly positioned to cut them down from behind. For a fraction of a heartbeat, our dark surroundings were illuminated from the sparks of my blade on their body.

Those four done with, I turned my head only to see that I had missed a fifth attacker. I raised a hasty arm upwards to deflect the attack off my shields. I was caught entirely off guard when the axe came down unimpeded before finding purchase in my arm. My moment of bewilderment cost me because the robot pulled on its axe, sending my lighter form flying across the cavern.

I turned what would have been a painful landing into a rough roll instead. My left hand darted out like a snake, fingers outstretched towards the robots. Nothing happened. Not a drop of psychic energy left my fingertips.

My Nyx had no energy. Unlike my previous experiences with such a dilemma, this time the well felt dry. I tried it again, but there was nothing there. Like trying to squeeze moisture out of a dry cloth. If I dug deep into my own well, perhaps—

I shook my head.

No matter. It was clear that these tin cans were no Corpus death squad. When I cut through them personally, I learned exactly how tough they were. There was no point letting this draw out any longer now that I knew of their fragility.

Each hand whipped a Stiletto machine pistol towards the battle in front of me. Not the most powerful weapons in my arsenal, but more than adequate to exterminate these. After a staccato of satisfying cracks, the attacking robotics were no more. I could have done that from the very beginning, if only I recognised whatever these things were.

With the battle over, I finally had the mental leeway to consider some of the oddities I faced. I looked down at the gash in my Nyx's arm. No shields, no manoeuvres, none of the psychic abilities that had made my Nyx so feared amongst my enemies.

There was something wrong with my Warframe's power system. For some reason, that meant that the only energy being provided to this Nyx was what I could channel from the Void through my true self.

That was going to be a problem.

1. Mara: twitter・com /rebbford/status/771434926512205824/photo/1

2. It's 2021 but we've still seen neither hide nor hair of any actual cityscapes in Warframe (and don't even know what planet Corposium is supposed to be on), so I picked a few real world Venusian valles at random and made vague reference to them being inhabited and developed.

3. Going with a mix of old lore (synthesis imprint era) and current lore (because obviously).

4. Chapter by chapter outline is still being adjusted, so character tags might be missing people or might list characters that don't get much focus