Humming softly, you wandered between the chairs of your dogs. The sound of bare feet walking across the concrete floor filled the silence.

Whirring of computers and electronics mingled in your ears, causing goose bumps to grow on your arms. Dissatisfied, you growled as the red light of a monitor illuminated your face.

The status of your dogs had deteriorated drastically. This usually happened after a transport, but several hours had passed and the vital signs had not risen.

Suspicious, you thought to yourself with curled lips, and walked round each chair once to make sure you weren't imagining the mugging.

All of these people were already clinically and officially dead, but the tech inside them kept their brains running. They no longer functioned on their own impulses, but were perfectly usable. Like an old computer that had been turned into a server.

Ultimately, these bodies were just another part of your equipment, just like the black bodysuit that clung to your body like a second skin.

Still, your dogs could become completely useless as soon as their supply diminished. Then everything would be destroyed with them, all the cyberware, their neurolinks and chips that were built into them.

There would be no way to save anything, because like all other high-ranking soldiers, your dogs carried a killswitch that would fry everything as soon as the body was registered as dead.

This was a common way of protecting information and tech from foreign influence who wanted to get their hands on intel and cyberware. Originally this process came from Militech, but Myers had adopted it as soon as she was elected into office.

As if of its own accord, your hand rose to caress the chip slots on the back of your neck. Ever since you knew about the killswitch, you had been trying to remove it without blowing yourself up or setting off an alarm.

Both seemed almost impossible. All you had accomplished over the years was to block the influence. But sometimes you wondered if that was just a fallacy and the chip might explode after all once Myers gave the order.

Clenching your teeth, your fingers tightened and scraped over the flesh of your neck. Traces were left behind and the feeling of a thin streak of blood ran down your spine.

Sighing, you dropped your hands to your sides. Each of your fingers twitched individually.

Bored, you yawned.

It would feel really good to kill this woman, to see her blood colouring the ground red and plunging the NUSA into chaos.

The thought made you laugh. That sounded like fun. Chaos tasted best after all.

A soft beeping filled the silence. The state of Two had gone critical. Something that had never happened before. You kneel down behind the chair and scrutinise the cables.

Your eyes twitched.

There was something right between the connection between the cable and the chair. Metal scraped over metal as you grasped it with two fingers and prised it out.

It was just a tiny module, consisting of two small cables and an adapter.

"Ha!", you breathed, a disbelieving grin on your lips.

Anger burned in your eyes as you crushed the module in your hand and let it trickle to the floor in small pieces. With a quick glance, you checked Two's monitor.

The situation had stabilised again within seconds. So someone had tampered with the supply during set-up. Should have noticed earlier. You had lost a whole day of regeneration and wouldn't be able to use any of the dogs in the battle tomorrow.

But maybe that was just a coincidence, poorly assembled by an amateur.

To make sure, you checked each of the chairs three times, once in the settings, then the electronics and finally the cables.

And everywhere you looked, you found one of these modules throttling the supply to a minimum. Your dogs were supplied with power, but not enough to allow regeneration. Instead, it kept dropping until the critical state was reached.

You stared in disbelief at the five remaining modules in your hand and snorted.

"That bitch...", you growled, crushing them all between the sharp claws of your fingers.

Someone had tried to sabotage you. And in a way, it was successful. Tomorrow you would have to get your own hands dirty.

Anything else would have been reckless, because your dogs were doing a good job and you wanted to keep them. After all, they were the reason you had earned your name.

Whistler.

Chuckling quietly to yourself, you twisted your mouth into a hated grin. There was only one person who was interested in getting rid of you.

Myers.

So after everything you did for her, both because she wanted it and because you felt like doing it, she got cold feet. All the dirt you could smear her name and reputation with. Apparently, this president was not without fears.

And what does one do when someone knows too much?

One terminated them.

You had secretly wondered why it had taken so long for her to try. However, that could simply be due to the timing. This war had already claimed more casualties than Myers had claimed in her speech. Many generals had fallen and all the more had been promoted.

No one knew the Whistler's face and in the end you were nothing more than a rumour, a story told by armies to remind their men to remain obedient.

Your disappearance, whether by death or otherwise, would not be noticed. And Myers knew that.

"Whore.", you growled, looking up at the ceiling.

Shadows fell through the window in the dark clouds. The shape looked suspiciously like an airship, huge and no doubt crammed with ammunition and other toys for war.

It moved so slowly that it wouldn't be noticed among the clouds. Militech wasn't stupid, they knew the radars didn't pick up anything that moved at a certain slowness. That was the only reason the ship had not yet reached its destination, it had to remain undetected.

Otherwise Arasaka would shoot it out of the sky immediately. It would have been a shame if something were to happen with it.

You had actually planned to finish this mission. But now your mind had changed. You had no desire to serve under the thumb of the NUSA any longer.

Instead, you wanted chaos.

Your eyes wandered back to the floor, straight to the crack in the door through which the light of the moon fell.

"When a man visits a woman so late at night, people usually think their share, Colonel.", you purred with a smirk on your lips.