There was no sense of day or night in the Strategic Coordination Bunker.
General Reyes hadn't slept in thirty-six hours.
His eyes were red.
Everyone in the bunker looked the same, used up, but still working.
Because stopping meant dying.
The Fort Carson assault video hovered in silence above the table, paused mid-frame, rows of terrified recruits firing blindly at a drone twice as fast as anything humanity had ever designed.
The Secretary-General stood at the end of the table, arms crossed.
"Run it again," she said quietly.
The technician rewound the recording.
The shriek of sirens.
The sudden drop of drones.
Recruits stumbling into the open.
The chaos, the terror, the frantic fire.
No one in the room flinched anymore.
There simply wasn't enough left in them for that.
When the playback ended, Reyes leaned forward and pinched the bridge of his nose.
"Let's get to the point. The attack pattern is too deliberate to be random. What do we know so far?"
A woman from the Joint Signals Directorate tapped her pad.
"We isolated the sensor pulse emitted by the drones. It's not a weapon. It's a scanning system multi-spectrum, sub-neural analysis capable of reading stress responses."
No one spoke.
She expanded the image.
A red beam washed across the frozen frame of a recruit crawling through mud.
"It captured heart rate, adrenaline spikes, tremor frequency, micro-expressions, gaze tracking, and something resembling neural activation patterns."
Reyes sat back slowly.
"So they're gauging emotional states."
"More than that," the analyst said. "They're mapping human behavior under acute threat."
The Secretary-General exhaled through her nose.
"Why focus on trainees? Why not scan our frontline divisions?"
The analyst hesitated.
"They did scan frontline units. But only briefly. At Carson, they stayed longer. Much longer."
President Ito spoke for the first time in an hour.
"Why would they prioritize recruits?"
The room fell quiet.
Another scientist older, hair silver, posture stiff cleared his throat.
"Because trainees represent potential. They represent what our species can become once fully mobilized."
Reyes lifted his gaze.
"You're telling me they're measuring future capability."
"Yes. They're modeling our development trajectory. How fast we adapt. How fast fear becomes discipline. How quickly civilians turn into soldiers."
The Secretary-General's fingers drummed once on the table.
"And what do they do with that information?" she asked.
The scientist switched the screen.
Alien symbols scrolled across the display, partially decoded through probabilistic linguistic models.
Four stood out highlighted in amber.
"Based on correlation analysis," he said, "these symbols translate approximately to.
Human Response Profile
Behavioral Threshold Index
Combat Efficiency Projection
Threat Potential."
President Alvarez looked up sharply.
"So they're assessing how dangerous we might become."
"Yes."
"And then adjusting their strategy accordingly."
"Yes."
Silence again.
Reyes leaned back in his chair, shoulders heavy.
"Show the orbital transmission."
The lights above dimmed.
A new screen displayed a burst of compressed data beamed from Earth's surface to the mass hidden behind the far side of the moon.
The symbol cluster pulsed once, as though acknowledging receipt.
Reyes stared at it, expression unreadable.
"That's not battlefield reporting," he muttered. "That's research."
The Secretary-General rubbed her forehead.
"So the attack wasn't meant to break us. It was meant to… measure us."
"Correct," the scientist said.
Reyes folded his hands, elbows on the table.
His voice lowered, steady but cold.
"Why scan recruits instead of killing them immediately?"
The scientist hesitated again longer this time.
"Because killing them doesn't provide useful data. Stress does. They needed to see how humans behave before conditioning hardens them. To record instinct, not training."
The Secretary-General looked at the paused image again a drill instructor firing desperately, recruits dragging each other to cover, flashes of red light cutting across the camp.
"And what did they conclude?" she asked quietly.
No one answered.
A strategist finally stepped forward.
He brought up a new graph alien signal complexity over time.
Blue lines: original drone behavior.
Red lines: behavior during the Carson assault.
The red spikes dwarfed the blue.
"This shows adaptive variance," he explained. "They learned from Carson. Their following engagements already reflect new tactics."
General Okoye who had been silent until now spoke.
"What sort of tactics?"
The strategist pressed a screen.
A map of Warsaw popped up.
Then Guangzhou.
Then Bogotá.
The aliens were changing formation.
Changing pathing.
Changing how they responded to human cover fire.
Okoye frowned.
"They're reading our doctrine like a book."
"They're rewriting theirs while they fight," the strategist replied.
"And Carson accelerated that process."
He didn't say the obvious conclusion.
He didn't need to.
The Secretary-General turned, placing both hands on the table.
"How many recruits were at that base?"
"Eight thousand."
"How many casualties?"
Reyes looked away.
"Based on initial reports… four hundred dead. Over a thousand wounded. Several hundred psychologically unfit for further training."
"And the rest?"
"Shaken," Reyes said. "But intact."
A small, barely perceptible nod from her.
"They survived," she murmured.
"No," Reyes corrected gently. "They endured."
He paused.
"There's a difference."
Suddenly a sharp alert tone cut through the bunker deeper, slower, the kind used only for orbital anomalies.
The orbital analyst didn't speak at first.
She just stared at her screen, lips parted slightly, hand frozen above her pad.
Reyes approached her station.
"What is it?"
She swallowed hard.
"General… the mass behind the moon has stopped."
Reyes blinked once. "Stopped what?"
"It has stopped moving. Complete halt. No descent. No approach. No acceleration."
The room seemed to inhale all at once.
"Show me," Reyes said.
The holo-map zoomed out, revealing the bright cluster behind the lunar dark side the alien armada.
Yesterday, it had been advancing.
This morning, repositioning.
Now…
It sat still.
Unmoving.
Waiting.
President Ito stood slowly from his chair.
"They've halted their landing sequence."
"Correct," the analyst said. "Every engine signature dropped to zero thrust. They're maintaining position."
The Secretary-General's fingers tightened around the back of her chair.
"How long have they been stationary?"
"Forty-three minutes."
"Which means the decision was extremely recent."
Reyes didn't look away from the map.
He didn't blink.
"It's because of Carson," he said.
The scientist nearest him nodded, face drained of color.
"The data the scouts transmitted… they must be integrating it. Revising second-phase landing profiles. Updating risk calculations."
"Meaning what?" Alvarez asked.
"Meaning," the scientist said, choosing his words carefully, "they're recalibrating their entire invasion model based on what they learned from those recruits."
A strategist stepped forward.
Her tone was controlled, clinical, but the tremor in her throat betrayed her.
"This isn't hesitation. It's computation. They're rewriting the playbook."
Ito exhaled shakily.
"How long will they stay halted?"
"We don't know," the analyst replied. "But the longer they recalculate, the more time we gain."
Silence fell across the bunker.
Reyes finally spoke, voice low and even.
"We thought we had three to four days before descent."
The strategist nodded.
"With this pause? We may have more. Possibly a week. Possibly longer, if their threat models require deeper restructuring."
Alvarez frowned.
"You're saying the attack on our trainees was so significant it forced an empire-level fleet to stop?"
The scientist nodded slowly.
"Humans adapted faster than expected. That is… a variable they do not handle lightly."
The Secretary-General looked at the paused battle footage the drones hovering, the chaos, recruits firing wildly, raw fear mixing with unplanned resilience.
"What exactly are they trying to account for?" she asked quietly.
The strategist answered.
"Our unpredictability."
Reyes closed his eyes briefly, absorbing the meaning.
"They saw something they didn't project," he murmured.
"They saw something they don't understand yet."
"And until they understand it," the strategist said, "they won't commit the main fleet. They're cautious. Methodical. They don't like unknowns."
Ito let out a breath not relief, but something colder.
"So we've been given… time."
"Yes," Reyes said.
"But not mercy. Never mercy."
The Secretary-General spoke carefully, each word deliberate.
"If the fleet remains halted, what does that mean for our mobilization?"
Reyes turned to her fully.
"It means everything changes.
We accelerate training.
We rebuild the camps.
We disperse and harden our strategic assets.
We use every hour they give us."
"And when they move again?" Ito asked.
Reyes stared at the unmoving cluster behind the moon.
"Then we'll know they finally believe they understand us."
He paused.
"And that will be the most dangerous moment of this war."
The Secretary-General nodded once.
"Then we act as if the fleet will descend tomorrow," she said. "But we prepare as if we've been given a year."
Around the room, officers began issuing rapid orders.
Relocation of training facilities.
Global redistribution of reserves.
Emergency manufacturing protocols.
Expanded intelligence operations.
Reyes lingered by the display one last moment.
The alien fleet glowed silently behind the moon, waiting.
He whispered, barely audible.
"You wanted to understand us.
Now we'll show you why that was a mistake."