Chapter Text
When Stalker first invaded the Operator's Orbiter, it was a bare, silent, sterile sort of ship. There was nothing to challenge his assumption, fed by the Orokin, that the Tenno and their warframes were one and the same thing.
This time, a fluffy trio of bird, goat, and fish floofs were piled up near the navigation console. Old-fashioned shawzin music drifted from below decks. The wall behind the Codex console was plastered with posters of k-drivers and kaithes, and one page on which the child scrawled, “Wally, stay out of my walls.”
The Orokin lied.
Regardless, he must make his way to the back of the Orbiter, to its beating heart and the Somatic Link from which the Operator commanded his warframes. Last time, no one challenged him. While the Operator was on a mission or sleeping, all the warframes were stored inert in the Arsenal.
This time, as soon as his proximity lowered the ramp from Navigation into the belly of the ship, a cheerful male voice asked, “Operator, did you disable the security grid? Do not do that again. That's how you get Murmur in the walls. Re-enabling.”
Cautiously, he peeked through the opening.
It was just a tiny owl-like Cephalon patrolling the Orbiter hallway. Stalker relaxed. He could swat its fragile remote body out of the air with one blow from his scythe Hate.
He crept down the ramp.
“Who's there?!” The Cephalon swelled with outrage. It's cute little blue eyes turned red as blood. It's voice deepened into that of a grizzled man. “SHOW YOURSELF.”
Stalker froze. He knew that voice.
He hadn't been there when the Orokin honored Ordan Karris, the mercenary known as the Beast of the Bones, with an offer to join their ranks. Hadn't been close enough to hear his guttural laugh as Karris spilled the kuva-blood of the Golden Lords. If he had, he'd be dead. He'd heard all about the slaughter afterwards from his fellow Low Guardians snickering in the mess hall about the haughty Dax warriors knocked down a peg by a single suicidal man so badass he cut them down with his bone plugs even while he bled to death.
He knew that voice from the battlefield. From the charnel ground of one of many genocides Ordan Karris committed for the Orokin in the name of money and brotherhood.
There was a certain dreadful irony in hearing it again, here. The Cephalon and his Operator were well-matched.
He ducked behind the Foundry, which was busy forging a Forma.
“Hmmm. Ordis will investigate.” A whirring noise emanated from the Cephalon. Sensor fields turned on. Golden light illuminated a cone ahead of him, not unlike the glaring gaze of a Narmer Deacon.
Stalker sunk down lower.
Drifter must have upgraded Ordis with Narmer tech captured during their adventures. Maybe even a Cephalon-sized version of his own jerry-rigged electrified machete. If Ordis caught him, it was going to hurt like hell for the few seconds before he got unceremoniously purged from the ship.
Ordis turned away and scanned the Arsenal console. Satisfied, he drifted down the hallway that led towards the Somatic Link. “Is that you, Helminth?! I told the Operator we should flush you out the airlock…”
Stalker flattened himself against the Arsenal. He peeked around its edge. The hallway split between the Operator's private quarters and the Somatic Link.
Ordis swung back towards the Operator's Quarters. “Umbra?!”
The old-fashioned shawzin music, which Stalker had taken for a recording, suddenly stopped.
sh*t.
Not all the warframes were inert or safely stored in the Arsenal after all.
If Umbra caught him poking around the Operator's ship, he'd be purged in pieces.
The shawzin strings resumed.
Ordis spun away. “Am I going ccccCCCCRAZY?!” He passed by the sealed door to the Operator's Somatic Link. It's proximity sensors unsealed the door. Ordis ignored it on his way to scout out Helminth’s infested alcove crawling with black spores.
Stalker took a flying leap inside.
The door resealed behind him.
Compared to the last time he came here with murder on the mind, the Operator had added roughly twenty or more Mastery Slates. A testament to their deadly prowess.
He approached the somatic chair. It opened with a shush and a hiss.
The Operator was still a child.
Stalker put Hate's edge to his throat anyway.
This time, the Operator wasn't wearing his hooded Zariman suit. Stalker got the terrible deja vu of looking down at the Drifter - but twenty or so years younger, and forever stuck in the throes of puberty. Beardless, freckled, with oily skin, and a smattering of acne.
The Operator raised one eyebrow, completely unimpressed that Hate could slice him open.
Well, at least the boy had that in common with Drifter.
Then the door hissed open behind them. Holding the Operator at bay, Stalker looked back.
Ordis floated in the doorway, eyes blazing. Umbra stood next to him, golden nikana drawn.
Speaking hurt. It rasped his chest and his throat like razors. Each word must forced out where he had no mouth. “Let me speak to the Drifter.”
The Operator said, “Well, why didn't you lead with that?”
Then he vanished in a sparkle of void power.
All Stalker could think of was that the Tenno had fled. Had escaped into his warframe rather than do this one simple thing without payment. That the next thing he'd feel was Umbra hacking him apart and the last thing he'd feel was Ordis purging his remains. Pure, all-consuming rage coursed through him like lava in his veins.
Then the void sparkles resolved into a more familiar man.
Drifter was exactly how Stalker remembered him. Tall, bearded, scruffy hair, and tired eyes that masked a stubborn soul.
Drifter eyed Hate, eyed Stalker, then looked beyond him to Ordis and Umbra. Then, when no-one else dared break the cautious detente, he raised one eyebrow.
It was uncanny, watching that exact same expression on a thirty-some-odd grown man only seconds after the child did it.
“So,” Drifter asked, “what’s the occasion?”
Stalker rasped. “Help me.”
If Jade did not need Drifter's help so badly, if her condition were not so dire, then Stalker would take great pleasure in the shock that spread across the other man's face. Payback time, you vainglorious whelp.
