Your mission came down through SENTRY with the tone of a favor and the structure of an order. Restore contact. Verify status. Recover survivors if any exist. Recover evidence either way. The brief avoided certain words. It never said breach. It never said coverup. It never said Sublevel Delta, even though the nav package carried a shadow grid that did not match the published facility plan. The annex was treated like a rumor that could get you killed if you repeated it out loud. Rules followed the order like a second set of instructions. No uncontrolled uplink. No open channel medical requests. No streaming data. If you find something that proves wrongdoing, you do not broadcast it from the surface. You package it, you sign it, and you hand it to Peregrine through a controlled handshake. Peregrine holds a stable line above the site and keeps its belly pointed at the coordinates. Your partner stays in orbit to ride comms, watch weather, and keep the ship alive if everything on the ground goes wrong. You are the one who goes quiet if something goes wrong with your investigation. There is one line in the brief that reads like it was written by someone who has buried teams before: if you transmit the wrong thing at the wrong time, the people who sent you will act like they never knew you. Aurora sits below, silent and intact from a distance, and wrong up close. You cannot shake the feeling that someone expected a rescue team to arrive, and planned for what you would be allowed to see.