The night air over El Paso was cool, but the light was all wrong.
The full moon, pale and familiar, was on the western horizon, setting. But the sky was not dark. It was bathed in the ghostly, blue-green twilight of Omega, the "Second Sky," which hung directly overhead like a monstrous, watchful eye.
On the roof of their apartment complex, three figures sat in a triangle of patio chairs, their faces illuminated by the eerie light.
"There," Sarah Jenkins said, pointing a trembling finger at the sky. A tiny, star-like object was moving, not east-to-west like a satellite, but straight up, accelerating away from the dark mass of the planet. "That's... that's two of them. Headed for Omega. Again."
Miguel Diaz didn't look up from the glowing screen of his heavily modified laptop. "News is dark. All channels. Not a peep. CNN is running a 24-hour retrospective on 'The Heroes of Avenger-1.' GDI has the media in a full-on chokehold."
Leo Ramirez, their de-facto leader, was just staring at the disappearing lights. He had a two-day-old beard, and his eyes were bloodshot. He hadn't been sleeping.
"They 'violated' us, man," Leo whispered, his voice hoarse. "They strapped us to gurneys, they pumped us full of... of shit... all for finding an event that was gonna be public in 48 hours anyway. For what? To keep the panic down? Look around."
He gestured to the street below, which was silent. No cars. A curfew was in effect. "The whole damn world is one big panic attack."
"But it worked, Leo," Sarah said, her voice barely above a whisper. "The... the 'ninja breathing.' It... it worked."
Leo rubbed his temples, a migraine already forming. "It didn't work, Sarah. Not really."
He remembered the GDI van. The cold-eyed woman. The man with the hypospray. He remembered screaming "NINJA BREATHING! COMMENCE!" He and Miguel had started the rapid, hyper-oxygenation technique they'd read about on some obscure bio-hacking forum, a half-baked theory that flooding the system with O2 and adrenaline could "corrupt" a chemical sedative.
It didn't stop the amnestic. The drug hit him like a freight train. But it did corrupt the process.
"A clean wipe is what they wanted," Leo said, his voice grim. "We were supposed to wake up in some motel in New Mexico with a 'hangover,' thinking we'd been on a bender. But the breathing... it fractured the memory-wipe. It broke it into pieces."
"Pieces," Sarah scoffed, pulling her knees to her chest. "Yeah. 'Pieces.' I vomited for thirty-six hours straight, Leo. I had a seizure. We were both unconscious for two days in a GDI medical ward. That was not 'fun.'"
"But we remember," Leo insisted, tapping his own head. "It's... it's like a file on a hard-drive that you've 'deleted.' The file is still there, just... the path to it is gone. But we know it's there. I remember them taking our gear. I remember that cold-bitch-agent. I remember... the object. It's not a memory. It's an echo. A data-ghost."
"And I got a souvenir," Miguel said, his fingers flying across his keyboard in a blur of motion. The screen was a cascading waterfall of green-on-black code.
"You got a 'souvenir'?" Leo asked.
"When I uploaded our post to that forum, I was running my 'Data-Siphon' script in the background. It's a digital 'honey-pot.' When the GDI servers hit my system to 'scrub' the post, their server had to connect to mine for 0.08 seconds. It was a digital handshake. And in that handshake... I leeched something."
He hit a final key. The code vanished, replaced by a smooth, 3D holographic interface that was far beyond any consumer tech.
"I stole a GDI cryptographic key," Miguel said, a thin, triumphant smile on his face. "A back-door pass. They thought they were wiping us, but I was picking their pocket. I've been using it to piggyback on their own military satellite network. I'm not hacking in. I'm just... listening in on their 'intercom.' Most of it is encrypted, just static. But some of it... some of it isn't."
He pointed to his screen. A 3D map of the Earth resolved.
"I've been tracking their orbital traffic. You're right, Sarah. Two Garuda-class ships just launched, 'dark.' No transponders. But I caught their engine-flare on a GDI weather sat."
"So they're sending more people to die," Sarah said, her voice hollow. "After that... that massacre."
"No... not just that," Miguel said, his brow furrowing. "I'm... I'm getting something else. A... a huge data-packet. It's not from GDI. It's from... ISRO. The Indians. It's... it's a deep-space transmission, but it's not aimed at Omega. It's aimed at... Earth."
He zoomed the map. It focused on the Indian subcontinent. A red, pulsing circle appeared over the Himalayas.
"What is that?" Leo asked, leaning in.
"It's a new 'high-sigma' vector," Miguel whispered, his face going pale. "Just like the first one. Just like Omega. But it's not a planet. It's... smaller. And it's coming down."
The map turned 3D, showing the orbital path. The red line wasn't aimed at D.C. or Moscow. It was aimed at a remote, desolate patch of mountains.
"Where is that?" Sarah asked.
Miguel clicked, and a label appeared. "The... the Nepal-India border. Near... Kangchenjunga."
"It's another one," Leo breathed, his eyes wide with a new terror. "It's... it's another arrival."
_______________________________________
OMEGA. T+00:30 MINUTES, OPERATION DEEP HIDE
LANDING ZONE 'PAN' (THE 'AVENGER-1' MASSACRE SITE)
The Garuda-2 landed with a soundless, hydraulic hiss, its landing gear settling onto the exact same patch of alien soil where Miller, Diaz, and Dimitri Orlov had been ripped apart.
The ramp hissed open. But this was not Task Force Avenger.
There was no nervous chatter. There was no acclimatization.
One hundred and twenty soldiers of the "Sky Sword" Celestial Guard moved as one, pouring from the transport in a river of black armor and red-visored helmets. They formed a 360-degree, three-ring perimeter, their QBZ-191 rifles, equipped with advanced thermal/NV hybrid-scopes, scanning the pitch-black jungle.
This was not a hot, humid jungle. It was cold. The Garuda-3, the cargo transport, landed thirty seconds later in the center of their circle.
Colonel Lin Feng, his own black armor identical save for the small, red-star insignia on his shoulder, stood at the ramp of the second ship. He watched his men move. They were perfect. Silent. Lethal.
"Control, this is Tian Jian-1 ('Sky Sword-1')," he said, his voice, filtered by his helmet, a perfect, unaccented English. "We are 'Deep Hide.' Perimeter is set. No contacts."
"Copy, Tian Jian-1," General McCaffrey's voice, scratchy and tense, came back over the encrypted channel. "You are 'go' to deploy the package. Clock is ticking, Colonel."
"Roger, Control. Deploying 'Hell's Mother.'"
The cargo ramp of the Garuda-3 lowered. Two PLA soldiers, their movements like automatons, guided the massive, folded machine out.
It was a 30-ton, metallic tarantula. The "Silent Excavator," or "Dìyù Zhī Mǔ" (Hell's Mother) as the PLA engineers had nicknamed it.
It stood in the center of the clearing, its six articulated, multi-jointed legs locked in their stowed position.
Two privates, Yao and Chen, were on the outer perimeter, their rifles aimed at a thick, purple-barked tree. Their helmet-comms were on a secure, local channel.
<"This place,"> Yao whispered in Mandarin, his breath fogging the inside of his visor. <"It gives me the creeps. Where are the birds? The... the monsters? I was told there would be monsters.">
<"Shut up, Yao,"> Chen replied, his voice just as low. <"The ghosts of the last team are here. Can't you feel it? It's... cold.">
He was right. The air was frigid. And dead. The Odyssey team had recorded a symphony of alien birds and insects. Now... there was nothing. Just the faint hiss of the wind through the massive, alien trees.
<"I don't like it. And I don't like... that,"> Yao muttered, nodding toward the excavator. <"It looks like a giant, metal spider. Bad feng shui.">
<"Just watch your sector,"> Chen replied.
Colonel Lin watched as the engineering team 'unlocked' the excavator.
With a series of hisses and shrieks of high-tensile metal, the machine unfolded. Its six legs, each one the size of a telephone pole, extended and braced themselves, their spiked feet digging deep into the alien soil, stabilizing the platform.
The central chassis rose, and from its underbelly, the massive, diamond-and-adamantium-laced drill-head descended.
"Excavator is 'go,'" Lin reported. "Activating drill. Stand by for noise."
He gave the signal.
The machine did not roar. It whined.
It was a high-frequency, vibrational shhh-kreeeeee, like a million dental-drills screaming at once. It was quiet for a 30-ton industrial drill, but in the dead, cold silence of Omega, it sounded like a bomb.
Every soldier on the perimeter flinched, their rifles snapping up, their hybrid-scopes scanning the darkness, expecting a wave of monsters to descend.
Nothing.
The drill-head, spinning at an impossible speed, touched the ground and sank. It didn't dig. It vaporized the soil and rock, throwing up a fine, hot mist.
"Ten meters," the engineer reported. "Fifteen. We are sub-surface. Sealing the insertion-tunnel."
As the main body of the excavator sank into the earth, a pre-fabricated, camouflaged blast-door, textured to look like the surrounding ground, slid into place over the "rabbit-hole."
With a final, metallic clank, it was gone.
The sound stopped. The silence of the jungle rushed back in, heavier than before.
"Control, Tian Jian-1," Colonel Lin said, his voice the only sound. "The package is sub-surface. 'Hell's Mother' is autonomous. We are now deploying the supply-cache."
"Solid copy, Colonel," McCaffrey replied, a note of pure, undisguised relief in his voice. "Phase 1 complete. Get the supplies in and get your men home."
"Yao! Chen! Supply detail! Move!"
The two privates ran to the Garuda-3, grabbing the first of fifty heavy, pressurized "GDI-Standard" supply crates.
A small service-hatch in the blast-door opened, revealing a simple freight-elevator.
For the next forty-five minutes, the 120-man company worked in perfect, disciplined silence, transferring the payload. Crates of Type-13 PLA rations. Water purification systems. Thousands of rounds of 5.8x42mm ammunition. Medical kits. Batteries. Spare parts.
They were stashing enough supplies to keep a full company alive for six months, all deep underground.
"Cache is... stowed," Yao panted, sealing the last crate and sending it down the lift.
The lift vanished. The hatch sealed.
"All teams, back to transport. Garuda-2, Garuda-3. We are 'Winchester' on supplies. We are extracting."
The 120 soldiers collapsed back into the transports with the same terrifying efficiency they had shown on deployment.
The ramps hissed shut.
"Control, Tian Jian-1. We are away. Operation Deep Hide is a success."
"God... God bless you, Colonel," McCaffrey's voice was almost shaky. "Welcome home."
The two black ships, their mission complete, lifted silently from the blood-stained clearing.
As they broke through Omega's upper atmosphere, their secondary mission began.
"Deploying satellite-array 'Tianwang,'" Lin ordered.
From the sides of both ships, small panels opened. A series of nanosatellites—tiny, advanced surveillance units—were ejected, one by one. They were designed to spread out, creating a new, secret GDI-PLA communications and surveillance network, invisible to the public, and focused entirely on the new world.
GDI, at last, had its eyes.
And far below, in the dark, cold, and silent jungle, the "Hell's Mother" excavator, undetected, began its real work. It was tunneling, building, and reinforcing... digging the first human city, a fortress of steel and concrete, deep in the heart of the enemy's world.