[TRANSMISSION ORIGIN: EDRD-HQ // SECTOR SIGMA]
[ENCRYPTION: HADAL-CLASS PROTOCOL / AUTH. LEVEL: OMEGA-3]
[RECIPIENT: ASSIGNED CREW / PROJECT HESPER]
[SUBJECT: MISSION CHARTER — OPERATION “SILENT EXPEDITION”]
[TIMESTAMP: REDACTED]
[BEGIN TRANSCRIPT]
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PERSEVERANCE CREW,

You’ve been handpicked because you’re the kind of people who don’t flinch when the lights start to bend.
Engineers, doctors, mechanics and the ones who operate where silence is thicker than air and pressure makes most men pray.
You’re not here by chance. You’re here because no one else can do this.

You’ll depart under standard maritime cover: routine mapping, supply, and combat operations along the upper sectors. Just another crew hungry for marks and clown horns. That’s what every manifest, transmission, and port log will say. But you and I both know this mission runs deeper literally and otherwise.

Once *PERSEVERANCE* clears 5000 meters, your official purpose ceases to exist.
From there, your real assignment begins: tracing the **Signal Pattern Delta-6**, originating from beneath Europa’s southern trench.
The waveform is consistent, deliberate, and by all recorded data impossible.
We’ve heard it echo through the ice for months. It’s growing louder.

Now listen carefully. *PERSEVERANCE* isn’t the name of your ship, gentlemen it’s the name for **you.** The Corporation provides your wages, your starting vessel, your supplies… and your glory, should you return.
Since you’re operating undercover, it’s up to you to blend in, acquire whatever abyss-class vessel you can get your hands on and make it believable.
From the outside, you’re just another crew trying to make a living. From the inside, you are the experiment.

You are to descend sector by sector, staging as a standard sub crew for as long as possible.
No outside disclosure. No coded leaks. No personal correspondence.
The Corporation has authorized deep isolation protocols. Expect months of deployment.
You’ll sleep in shifts. You’ll forget whoever you were before this. You’ll start hearing things you can’t tell are real.

We’ve prepped you for every contingency except the truth.

Do not ask what’s next. There is no more information to give you.
You’re a skunkworks team, gentlemen on a frontier of absolute unknown.
Only you will understand what this signal truly is.

Should you reach the source, **do not attempt communication.**
Record, recover, and ascend. That is all.

There are frontiers that make explorers. There are frontiers that unmake them.
You’re standing at the edge of both.

Hold the line, *PERSEVERANCE.*
The silence is waiting.

─────────────────────────────────────────────
SIGNED: [██████ █. HALSTROM]
TITLE: DIRECTOR — EUROPA DEEP RESEARCH DIVISION
PROJECT HESPER // CORPORATE OVERSIGHT COMMAND

[END TRANSMISSION]
[SIGNAL TERMINATED // DEPTH UNKNOWN]
[NO RESPONSE DETECTED]