Everyone else was vapor. The sky was all mine. Something screamed on the left. It was an automated alarm, one we had all been trained to recognize. The computational units were blowing out one by one, and I was going down. The entire cockpit was a flashing array of lights and smoke – ah, smoke. It was technically fumes but liquid metals and flash-vaporized coolant from breached lines can fool a fellow to think of it as smoke, because it was as black as the emissions from burning rubber. Impact hurt like hell. Now I was spinning, and the centrifugal forces were enough to break bones. The structural integrity had already been compromised but when I hit that first something… it was really hard… a length of steel strut came spearing through the pit, clawed a length of paint from the inside of one calf and went between my knees, closing the gap between my lap and my chest to pin my shoulder to the seat I was in like a giant safety pin.
My head rolled forward; I was unable to breathe the processed atmosphere inside the pressurized mask on my face, unable to see past the fumes or the sweat. My visor had filmed over, a residue that resembled condensation. The sound of cracks forming in sharp sections in a plate of glass soon gave way to that horrible shattering scream of it flying to pieces. Shards rained across my armored hide, creating an almost melodic song as the glass sprinkled on metal. I was going down. Secondary impact felt more like a searing burn, the feeling of terrain sliding across the underside of the hull reverberating up through the craft to the cockpit and through; hot, unforgiving wind clawed at my head, even as the shaking craft finally slid to a halt.
That bone-jarring tipping point, where the little ship found something harder than its nose and flexed slightly in its self-dug grave before relaxing and settling into the seared dirt it had plowed proved as bad as secondary impact. Doubtless that furrow was several hundred meters long. The agonizing vibration of sliding had certainly lasted long enough.
Wind howled through the broken plasmodia-lace glass shield, howled under the growing towers of billowing fumes and smoke, as heat from some areas lessened and in others increased. Nausea overwhelmed. I couldn't lift my head, but for as much as the weakness commanded my lolling actions, I knew if I stayed in the wounded ship, I would die with her.
Raptor 11, that's what her name was. Delta squadron… an extension of the 51st. The memory faded. I couldn't recognize what feeling it was that came to haunt me then until I remembered, but in that brief moment I knew and understood I was going to die. Raptor 11 was a ticking time bomb now, her fuel lines breached and her hull partially boiled away. Fragments missing, sections torn… she was a shredded mess. So was I. I held no grasp on reality, but I didn't, couldn't, care. My eyes had closed, as my ragged, shallow and liquid breath began to slow. The part of the Longsword thrust through my shoulder holding me in my seat was the selfsame part of her that I had stroked, just running my hands over her magnificent form as I admired her… before this fateful, final flight of the last Longsword flyer.
Fear. Yes, fear. I knew what it was now. I was afraid… and then I blacked out.
FIELD MASTER – G'WI 'CAERVASNEEHumans, just over that ridge. That's what they kept saying. Just over that ridge, just around that corner, just past that hill. Frankly I was sick of it, was ready to kill them to make them shut up. The aerial battle above us had gone well, surprisingly. Honored pilots in victory yet again. The scourge that was Humanity was being swept aside and turned under, scraped off the collective boot of the Holy Covenant. And well that it should.
But why me! How I had begged, but no one had heard my plea. Why could I never obtain a real combat post? The Unggoy under my command had sickened of my words and I of theirs, but we had become as like kin, united in our frustrations. Always were we the last to a scene, always were we pushed back and "held in reserve"… ha! As if we would buy that! Honorable position my rotting ass. I could have sworn I would have bled for my cause by now. Could have sworn I would have been making my enemy bleed for theirs.
Really, though, the scenery on this one wasn't that bad. With the UNSC sparkle in the sky and the pleasant hues of green shaded against a brilliant yellow dwarf sun… ah, it wasn't so bad. But it was still boring. A grunt hopped too near to my side and bumped his little head against my hand, but all I could do in response was laugh. Yes, it was that bad. We were miserable… my Unggoy and I. Coming upon a shallow valley between cliff faces – we weren't precisely in a mountain range so much as some weird form of canyon matrix where all the good stuff was down in the cracks – we headed in, following a small stream that wound gently down through the middle of it all.
The patrol was useless. Humans in the area had been wiped out long, long time ago, and I and my team were just for show. My only Sangheili companion, Welav 'Dedekilee, was toodling along at the rear of the group just for the hell of it. Sometimes I did that. There was no point in standard formation when no one was looking and it didn't matter anyway because there was no engagement. I couldn't understand what I… what we… had collectively done so wrong to be treated this way.
Personally, I couldn't recall sleeping with any High Councilor's daughters, or mentioning the color of the Prophet's undergarments in public, but… I had spent the last five years wracking my brains and had come up with nothing. I wanted nothing more than these two things the most; first, I wanted to know why I was being kept "in reserve" when there was no point in keeping anyone there. And naturally, second, I wanted it to st –
Crap! Shit! Shit! Fire and thunder suddenly surrounded everything, and screaming Unggoy were going in all directions. My hand found my t-25DER quickly enough, but I was choking on the fumes and smoke and grit just like everyone else was, staggering about seeking clean air. Impact of something huge and heavy rattled us all from our feet, rattled our very skeletal frames, but when I started to rise and run in some randomly selected direction I never expected to be the only one who chose the right random direction that day. Behind my racing hooves came sailing in what remained of a Human fighter craft, and I thought for sure it was going to mow me down like chaff, and then blow up on top of my team like they always did in those short, captured surveillance films I had seen some of.
But though I was knocked from my hooves yet again in (I admit) bawling protest, the bird landed hard and sailed clear of my position, to rain fiery hell down as it threw a furrow up, plowing under the pretty little valley and most certainly drying out that stream! Choking and coughing, I pressed the ground away from my face, and lifted my head to look after the retreating, ruined crashing plane.
Humans called them Longswords. I called them sparkle, but that only applied when they were destroyed, and in vacuum, because they tended to become flames and shrapnel when in atmosphere. This one, while crashed, appeared more or less intact. Rising to a knee, I pushed my hooves beneath me, and wiped the grit from my mandibles before starting the trek between myself and where I thought I would find my team.
Running screaming in terror was not without honor, I surmised, when one has a Longsword falling onto one's head… but I couldn't find much in the way of even remains. Every last one of my Unggoy had blown to shreds, their tanks popping and embroiling, adding to the falling ship's contrail of smoke and fire. But my companion Sangheili warrior… 'Dedekilee… him I only sort of found, in part and in pieces.
He'd been the unlucky soul who was landed directly on when the bird finally hit ground, and his body had been smeared rather gruesomely all along the bottom of that furrow… which meant, yes, he was quite thoroughly cooked solid. No blood I could discern, because of this, and none of his armor or equipment remained the same shape.
Truthfully there was nothing left of him. Just char. Looking at the now-still ship, I wondered whether to be thrilled at the prospect of something other than fatal boredom, or enraged at the loss of all those I had been condemned to said boredom with. If that Human pilot was still alive, I vowed on the spot, he soon would wish he wasn't.
Trotting to close the gap, I hopped first onto the wing and then back off, calling like some little juvenile female for the heat I had suddenly discovered through the soles of my combat shoes. Damn but that ship was hot! Hotter than hell! Hissing and stepping from hoof to hoof even though I wasn't walking, I waved my fists at the dead bird before me. It had no cockpit shield, though, so I stepped lightly down to the fore of the crumpled craft and peeked in.
"By the Prophets!" The words escaped me even before I realized I had spoken. The Human inside the pit was one of those fabled super-warriors that had been bred special for combating overwhelming odds… like my own side of the current war. One of said individuals, designated by two numbers; two ones, and a seven, had been reported as seen on our most precious holy relic. A giant hoop-thing, something the Forerunners had built… personally I had my doubts that it was really Halo. There was just too much Forerunner junk floating around to be sure, from my perspective, but still, Forerunner architecture was hardly somewhere I'd like to see a Human. They would soil its very existence with their infidel souls.
Or… so spoke the Prophets, selfsame fellows who had condemned me and mine for a non-crime that I hadn't even managed to isolate from all my other non-criminal actions, thus far. Who was to say they weren't wrong about that hoop-thingy even being Forerunner?
Back to point – I reached in, but the Spartan had been speared through, and the constant, impatient static crackling across his combat skin told me he had no shielding and wouldn't until said spear was removed. I could see no way of doing that, though, so I sat back and thought for a time. If he was dead, I was going to rip my own eyes out for the boredom of isolation and loss – if he was alive, I'd rip out his instead. But I had no intention of fighting with his superheated craft, so I needed to extricate him from it before anything else could happen accordingly. With a sigh, I powered up my energy blade, and I first sliced through the part that would have hindered my pulling his doubtless heavy person from said indicated fighter-craft. When I finally got that to fall away, I was hit in the face with a blast of fumes and vapor and smoke, and sent staggering, reeling back from it to drop to a knee and retch my previous meal.
Oh, nice. Wiping the remains of it from my mandibles, I pushed back upright, and returned to the ship. I had to slice through the front part of the frame shaft, then the back of the pilot's chair until said item had been verily shredded and was smoldering for such lengthy exposure to my blade, but I finally got the unfortunate Spartan free, and then I discovered how heavy he really was.
This was no small Human. He was neither lanky nor especially thin, but though he could have looked me in the eye without bending much to do so, his mass and bulk more than made up for his proportions and at a glance without comparison one would assume he was normal Human-sized. I wasn't sure if it was his carcass or his armor, though, that held him to that seat, but I wasn't going to be so easily defeated.
Hooking my arms under his, I braced both hooves opposite him on the sill where the pit shield had been, and slowly curled upwards. He seemed to come free easily enough like that, and hopping from the top of the cockpit to the ground was easy too. Keeping from being buried by the anchor in my arms was not, but somehow I managed.
Rising from my knees, I slung the Human over a shoulder, and began to carry my prize away. If ships came down in my valley, I didn't want to be in my valley anymore. The last thing I wanted to look like was my good buddy 'Dedekilee. The detonation of the Longsword's remains only solidified that idea for me, and I spared it only a brief glance before resuming my journey.
SIERRA 093 – FLINTWas this hell?
I mentally apologized for the presumptuous thought, but then I just turned right around and found myself giving that theory some serious consideration. The odds that it was indeed some alter form of a divine trash bin, and I had fallen into it, I was honestly no worse off than before. All I needed was a gun, some ammo, and a few good friends here and there would be nice too. But I had managed without that last before, so I was in no immediate danger.
Still, right now I was in more personal agony than I had previously known… though I had to admit I had never been shot down before either, so this whole escapade was a new one on me. I could taste blood in my mouth but I wasn't sure if I had coughed it up or I'd bitten my own tongue, so I tried a systems' check of the rest of my battered carcass.
117 would have been ashamed of me, falling down on the job like this. I was supposed to be making sure the UNSC didn't fail miserably out here, just like he was, out at Reach… except suddenly no one knew where he was anymore, not even the Pillar of Autumn. The cruiser squadron I had been dispatched with was probably long gone by now, leaving me in the heart of the expanding Covenant frontier.
So if this was hell, then I'd be needing… I suddenly realized my eyes had opened, and it was about that point that I realized I wasn't wearing my helmet anymore. Bright blue sky came into focus, past an overhang of stone and dirt, the occasional root ball hanging down from that… wait. Wasn't I in a Longsword fighter? Turning my head to the best of my ability, I saw then that I was now laid out flat on the side of a grassy knoll, tucked up under some leaning cliff face. Out there beyond said hill was just more of the same, maybe that dark streak was some form of water or something.
Finally, the rest of me started working again. Lifting my head, I rolled my shoulders to sit up, but though I managed to get that far, I didn't get too much farther as I crunched my face up for the still-present injury in one of them. Touching my chin to my collarbones, I frowned at the I-beam shaped bar of metal still protruding from the injury. But being possessed of an analytical mind didn't allow much time to dwell – I soon realized the nature of the cut that had been made through that bar, and I knew then to look for some Covenant companion, likely my captor.
Why I was still alive despite surviving the crash then came to mind, but though I didn't immediately see anything Covenant, I also hadn't been tied up or down or to anything stationary, so… now I was just puzzled. Taking the end of the bar in my good hand, I tried to pull it out. It wasn't that it hurt too damn much to make myself do it, but I found quickly that it was in a custom hole in my Mjolnir-clad shoulder, and I wasn't going to get it back out any time soon, not without help. It was stuck, and unless I moved my arm, it wasn't even going to wiggle. With a resigned sigh, I picked myself the rest of the way up and started to walk, though I didn't get far before I spotted my helmet.
It was in the hand of one of those Covie bastards, the kind that like to laugh at you when you fall dead, and complain when you put up a decent fight. This one was just staring at me, though, in perfect silence. He had guns, I noted sourly, and I did not, not to mention he had my helmet too. That changed; for reasons undisclosed to me, he threw it at me, forcing me to catch it one handed or be brained by it.
My aim was better than his, though, and I did catch it, though getting it back on my head was a trick, with just the one arm to work with. By the time I had the thing settled and could see through the visor again, he'd gotten a lot closer, but I forestalled my notion to break his neck (he was that close) when he wrapped one hand around that bar and anchored his other against my afflicted shoulder. I held as still as I dared, considering who was giving me the aid, but it still took the guy a full minute of hard tugging (and nearly knocked me over twice) to get the bar out of my shoulder.
A sudden wave of nausea washed past me, but I didn't see the gush of blood pouring from the suddenly open wound until much later – which meant it was dripping all over the grass at our feet when I noticed it. Bad as that was, then the stinking bastard stuck his energy sword in the hole and lit it off. That made me scream.
I wasn't sure how or when, but I had driven to my knees by that point, wavering without balance even as such, the bad arm curled against my chest and the good hand over the hole in the front. The one in back had too much armor to even stick my longest fingers down into and reach meat. I was wounded, and lightheaded, and on my knees in front of a Covie bastard… gathering my wits, I looked up at him. Surely he knew better than to try to take a Spartan alive. I was going to kill him, soon as I got my feet back under me.
But first… need to do something about that damned shield meter alarm.
FIELD MASTER – G'WI 'CAERVASNEEI had never thought a Demon could scream like that. It was something of a surprise to me to see him upright so soon, but being an augment meant little to me, so I had expected to be surprised… I guess. Just not that way. Getting the bar out of his shoulder had proven tedious, but he'd toppled almost as soon as the thing came free.
More blood than I had thought belonged in a shoulder came pouring out of that gaping hole, but by then he'd sunk to a knee, acting lightheaded. If I had lost that much blood that fast, I think I would have been no better, but it still garnered a small sense of satisfaction that lonely me could bring one of the Human's best to their knees without (relatively speaking) much effort.
Standing that close to a living Spartan was a little unnerving, though, as I had neither a great deal of field experience nor had I any special training to be the best at whatever task or duty. I was just a field grunt, even if the Unggoy still called me an Elite. I walked around behind my captive, wondering what I was going to do with him – dragging his battered and perforated carcass halfway across a continent to the base I had been deployed from didn't sound appealing, especially since I had gotten to this locale in a dropship. But calling in someone to pick us up didn't sound too appealing either – after all, if I lost custody of this fellow, I would be forgotten and pushed aside yet again. Here, I suddenly realized, was my biggest opportunity to get out of my little rut.
You saved my sanity, I thought, staring at the back of the Spartan's helmet. If I delivered a live Spartan to the Prophets to torture or whatever… parade around and boast with… who knew what honor or accolade I might receive? I smiled, then, feeling suddenly rather grateful to the miserable form hunched before me. He would make one last use of himself, before he died.
Oh, I was going to take very good care of this one… he was the embodiment of my ascension. Taking my field medical kit, I spread the contents on the ground, before addressing the Human's injury again – it was cauterized now, but it was still going to be a bother if it didn't get better attention. He had to stay alive – or at least coherent – until the Covenant came to get me. I had a lot of trouble with getting past his armor, but it wasn't that bad – considering some of it was redirected into his shoulder, and I had to peel that out, it did give me a little more room to operate in, although at the same time I had no idea what kind of anatomy I was messing with and would have far rathered I could remove the armor vest entirely… but pickers couldn't be choosers.
And I was a notch below a picker. I was a beggar, but so far as I could tell, I was the beggar who had found the gold nugget in the sands of a lost section of land, and I was not going to let it slip through my fingers. Any Human could be poked into some semblance of that armor suit, but a living one would need to be an honest Spartan or merely curling the fingers on his hand would break all the bones in that arm. I still didn't understand why, but that was just the truth of the matter. Humans were odd in that fashion, making custom cuts that only a certain criteria could meet… and isolating its use down to a few good individuals. Which meant if the suit was good, but the Human was dead, then the suit was as useless as if it had been completely destroyed.
He sat still, for most of the time I spent working on his injury, but he flinched away when I was almost done, making me wonder if I had touched a nerve ending or something, but after the initial reaction he again was still. After I was done, though, he decided to become a pain. Taking off the ground like he meant to undo me, he caught the lip of my armor vest and sent his other fist – the one attached to his good arm – flying at my face.
But, since the one hanging onto me was weakened, I easily shrugged it off and dodged the blow, before responding with a double-fist into his gut, which bowled him over onto his back with a pained grunt. He was going to get up again when I planted a hoof on his chest and leveled my t-25DER at his face. This inspired some quiet thought before he decided to say something, rather than hit me again.
"If you don't kill me," he said, "I'm going to kill you. You can't keep me hostage."
Hostage!! Ha ha ha! What a notion! Hostages were traded for demands back to those from whence they had come. No, this Spartan was not a hostage, because he wasn't going to be ransomed to Humanity. He was going to be ransomed to the Covenant, because Humanity had nothing I wanted, though the Covenant did, and both were equally desiring to have Spartans – one to use them against the Covenant, the other to publicly tear them limb from limb, videotape it, and mail the tape to Humanity to watch.
This poor sot hadn't a clue.
"Get your foot off me." He was talking again.
"Why would I do that?" I wondered aloud. I caught his hand reaching for my ankle and smacked it aside with my rifle.
"I'll kill you!" He screamed, sending it back and this time unseating my hoof from atop him, but in response to that I just gave him a hard kick. He rolled, stuck an arm out to stop, and picked himself up with his good arm before stalking back and attacking again.
"Don't make me ruin that armor of yours!" I threatened, but it was as if he couldn't hear me. I snarled; he caught that, I noted sourly. So I brained him with my t-25DER, sending him staggering back, but he returned as soon as he had his balance back, and this time I had to fend off a rain of blows, half of them half as powerful as they ought to have been. I seized him by the hole in his shoulder and his attention redirected to it, clamping both hands onto my wrist as I pulled him bodily off the ground and growled at him. "I want you alive." I said. "But I don't need you alive. So don't make me mad, Human."
"Let go!" He clawed at my arm, my shoulder, tried to hit me again, to make me release him. I just sank my claws down through the meat on the inside of his shoulder, making him scream again. He buckled, struggling against my iron grip. "Let…" His tone had changed. "Just… please. Let go."
Ah, what the hell, he was too heavy to hold like this all day anyway, so I extended my arm and let go – he dropped onto his side, curled around that gaping wound, breathing so hard it came through the comns relays in his helmet. He killed a lot of grass dragging himself first from me and then back to his feet, but when he stood facing me again, he did so with squared shoulders. Without a weapon, this Spartan sure didn't amount to much… although he had some frighteningly quick reflexes. I pointed a bloody finger at him. "Mind your manners."
He stood there in silence, staring at me, until I turned away and cast my eyes across the sky, looking for any sign of Banshees or Phantoms… dropships of any kind, for that matter. Scouts, I didn't care. I didn't have provisions for a journey of the kind that it would be, getting back to that cruiser parked over the base. I felt something stir the air behind me, and spun about in time to catch the Spartan trying to pull a fast one on me, so I smacked a fist into his dark, shiny visor and watched as he dumped over backwards. He kicked one of my knees, from there, and then I went down in much the same manner. Curling back to my hooves, we met in the middle as he had done practically the same thing. I caught his good arm by the wrist and turned an elbow into his helmet, twisting him in two different directions at once. He came back with a feeble hit with his ruined arm, but it was enough to back me up a little and prime that fist for another hit. Clawing my fingers from his good arm, instead, he kept his grip on my hand and turned me partway to hit me in the back of the head, only I had ducked it, and all he did was loosen the seat of my own helmet.
I twisted down and back around to face him despite his left holding onto my left, and I picked up nearly my entire body to kick him in the middle – at the same time as catching his helmet and slapping his head around to the side. He fell, and brought me with him, but I was on top, and I caught that other, pseudo-wounded arm, and pinned both of his hands to the ground. "Enough, Spartan!" I snarled.
"Why won't you die!" He complained, twisting beneath me in an attempt to be freed.
"Because I'm too damn stubborn!" I shot back. "You pull something one more time and I'll end your sorry ass!"
He spent a couple of minutes lying still, huffing at me from behind that dark lens, but I'll be damned if I couldn't have sworn the Human was deaf or something. "You want to kill me? Huh? Then why don't you? What are you waiting for?" He wasn't taunting, which was where I got my theory. He honestly didn't understand my actions and really, really wanted to know what in the world I thought I was doing. And while I admit keeping a Spartan captive with nothing save my own wit and muscle to pull it off was not the brightest of my ideas, I couldn't quite grasp why he didn't appear to be able to hear what I was saying.
I had seen fellow Sangheili trying to talk to Humans that couldn't understand them, that was different. Lack of comprehension and not hearing were reacted to in very distinctive ways, and I knew for sure that unless he'd burst his drums in the crash or something, there was no reason why he should be playing stupid.
"You have two options, split lip." He added. "Kill me or let me kill you, but this little arrangement we have now just doesn't cut it and it won't last."
"Yes it will." I insisted. "Yes, it will."
"Come on!" He now sounded really frustrated. "Say something!"
"…what?" I was right! He was deaf! Oh, lovely. "Nevermind." I shook my head, sighed, and got off of him. How could I communicate with a deaf Human? How indeed? This was going to be a lot more interesting than I had bargained for… because now we couldn't even cry insults at one another. And that, I knew, would become very boring very quickly.
He sat up, and watched me retreat, shaking my head in disappointment and bemusement, even as I took my helm in hand and settled it back where it belonged. Instead of seeing me as plain and simple enemy, now he was looking at me like I was some kind of enigma… and that was not a pretty prospect between Spartan and Elite when I was the one being so looked upon.
SIERRA 093 – FLINTHe would growl at me… would sigh and shake his head. He would even grunt as if disinterested. But that damned odd Elite never spoke a word. It was almost as if he couldn't… but kept trying to. Like he didn't understand why I couldn't tell what he was saying. Like he thought it was I with the disability, as though I were deaf.
But I wasn't deaf. My hearing was just fine. I heard everything with acute clarity. The soft crack as he straightened his knuckles, the distant call of birds. The wind, in the grass, and the creak and groan of what could have been a tree on top of the cliff I was under. I could hear every protesting shriek of metal on metal when our armor collided, during the fighting we'd done.
But I couldn't hear what he was saying, and he just kept thinking I could. Until I had asked him why he wasn't… most any Elite, embattled or not, will say something, invariably, whether to complain about being struck or to gloat when victorious even when it was only one kill and there were dozens more. Elites liked to talk. They always had something to say.
Not this one. He stood there, arms akimbo, studying me as though wondering what to do with me now he thought I was deaf. Could I play on that? Or should I point out to him that it wasn't me? Better – how could a fellow go through life assuming they could speak and really have no such ability? How does something like that go unnoticed? Surely a squadmate, maybe a member of his bloodline, a passing superior, might have mentioned it to him…??
He was doing it again. Yeah, he thought it was me. I sighed. Great – here lay a communication barrier no one could cross, because the damned split lip was convinced he could do something he obviously couldn't. I wondered what to do then. At first I had wanted to kill the bastard, take his guns and his shit and trek off for friendly ground. Now I found myself considering breaking the bad news to him. Should I bother? He seemed to get along just fine without it… for now.
Ha! Just wait till he gained some rank, and then try ordering subordinates around like that. I laughed to myself, and shook my head, pulling up a knee and resting my good elbow on it. What a day. I get shot out of the sky, crash badly, am pulled from certain death by the enemy (who happens to be all alone, no inclination why), and then come to find out the dude is mute. Meh… can the day get any worse? At least he wasn't trying to kill me outright, and I had the opportunity to heal, maybe swipe his gun when I catch him sleeping or something, off him and be gone before dawn. He was almost as stubborn as I was. I had to admit – I wasn't sure whether to laugh at the ludicrousness or just throw up my hands and walk away before a Grunt wearing a g-string showed up. If I saw one of those, though, I was liable to eat my own gun.
There was no saving someone who was that far gone. I had seen a few Marines lose it like that, had even had to shoot one to keep him from offing all his squadmates, when he became convinced they were all Covenant in disguises. It was sad, really… and would be a sad ending indeed for a Spartan. Still, if I wasn't slowly going out of my mind, I wanted to be able to tell a reasonable tale when and if I managed to get back. "You have a name?" I asked, looking back at the Elite standing ten paces to my left. He still had his arms crossed.
He made some weird motion, but like I thought he would, he didn't say a word. No sound escaped his throat.
"Look, if you think I'm deaf, do you really think saying it will get it through to me?"
It worked. He rolled his eyes, threw up his hands and started walking away. Had he suddenly decided I wasn't worth his trouble, or was he going to go and pretend to speak with someone on the other side of a comn? I laughed heartily at the idea of the poor fellow trying to talk to an operator, but I drug my carcass off the ground and followed him, for lack of anywhere else to go. Staying here would be the end of me – I could better accomplish my new mission if I had somewhere to steal a ride from, and there didn't exactly look to be anything similar around here.
"Do you speak at all?" I called ahead. "Or do you always just think at people?"
He turned partway, to frown at me over his shoulder, but he didn't "talk" at me this time, he just turned back to his path and kept walking it. I found myself grinning like a fool behind my visor at the back of his head. What an affliction to be stuck with and find oneself all alone!
My mind made itself up right then – yeah. This was hell. It just wasn't my hell.
FIELD MASTER – G'WI 'CAERVASNEEHe was certainly annoying! I had no intention of feeding his mirth by speaking to him when he and I both now knew he was incapable of hearing anything I said. He was laughing at me, intermittently, something I had not known Spartans to do. But this one was, and he was getting a real kick out of being deaf at my expense.
But at least I wasn't needing to drag him.
Most of the trip down the vale was uneventful, but there were varying forms of wildlife here and I expected to see one or two of them show themselves eventually. My Spartan companion didn't appear concerned with much beyond the back of my head. I suspected he was considering how to break it.
Under normal circumstances, my team and I would have had the fellow under all kinds of bondage and he'd be dragging behind the Unggoy – in this case, though, I had neither anything to tie him with and no real need to – he was still thinking like a free man, but it was conducive to my goals at the moment. If he thought I was going to lead him to a place he could steal transport from, fine. I wouldn't have to worry about him killing me prematurely nor him running off somewhere obscure either.
As odd as the situation seemed, for now, we were friends. I could still hear him chuckling to himself behind me, but at the passage of the last thought across my forebrain I found myself laughing with him. It was a moment of mirth for the two of us – each laughing at the ludicrousness of our unlikely situations.
We had covered an impressive amount of territory by dusk, but though personally I was exhausted, my Spartan had been dragging for the last several miles. I imagined he would have been willing to plug on for most of the night as well were it not for his… was it severe?… injury. He was an odd one, but now even I was ready to stop. I dropped to my knees in the hollow between hills, the scrub brush around me reflecting in hues of green grey as they fell to black and white for the fading light.
The Spartan sat hard next to me, and folded a leg beneath him, before resting the elbow of his bad arm on his upraised knee. I looked over at him, so he looked back, and I grunted, partially disinterested and partially too tired to care. I knew I would still fight him if he attacked me, but I wasn't going to initialize any conflict at this point.
Making the Spartan walk this much farther than he would have liked would need to do, I supposed, for making him sorry he creamed my team. In the morning, I would have rested and could think up more creative ways. In the mean time, I was little more interested in constructive thought than just getting some sleep.
Doing that in the presence of one of the Elite of the enemy was a little nerve wracking, though, as there was nothing between us save the night air. Bug song filled the space between us, our gazes locked on one another trying to decide who would pass out from fatigue first. Finally, I heaved a sigh, and turned away. If he killed me, so what. If I had to kill him, big deal. I knew each of us was equally as liable to get out of here alive as the other, but I was the one with the information in my head as to which direction the nearest Covenant base was. That, I figured, was if they hadn't decided to leave and let me rot here for the rest of my life. If that were the case, there would be no end to the mayhem I was going to cause if they were stupid enough to leave something flightworthy behind.
And if I was feeling cruel, maybe I'd take my new Spartan pet with me, and let him help make trouble.
I drew a breath, and let it go slowly, as I settled and relaxed my posture. I let my head sink a depth as my eyes closed, but though my spine curled slightly as I bent forward, I remained more or less seated upright sitting on my heels. Focusing inward, I stilled the rolling chaos of thoughts and memories in my mind, and listened to the silence that enveloped all.
SIERRA 093 – FLINTIf I hadn't been so hell bent on getting something good out of this Covie bastard, I would have let him leave me behind a good span back, and then just sufficed with tracking him. But I had seen the storm building on the horizon and I knew that if I let him get out of my sight, the rain would erase all sign of his passage, leaving me lost and stranded.
And wounded.
That detail had not escaped me – I had lost a lot of blood, and now it was leaking clear fluids, which couldn't be good, but it had made a run of sticky grit down the front, and doubtless the back, of my armor. Any and all stirred dust and dirt clung to it, the shiny fluid seeping each time I so much as pulled on the deltoid of that arm. It was hard not to – I had never had such a great gaping hole in me before, and not moving an arm that had not been immobilized while trying to move across uneven terrain had proven most difficult.
Even with the prominent ache it afforded every time I got too free with my motions. When he finally let me sit, I propped the arm up, hoping to stall some of the pain inside a numbness with elevation. So seated and still, though, I got a good look at my impromptu companion, and it was only then that I realized he hadn't really cared that I was following him. How this Elite's mind worked was really starting to get to me, though – first he saved me from my crashed bird, then doctored my wound, and promptly proceeded to try to out-walk me!
He was tired, too – very much so. But instead of getting some sleep, the weird fellow had gone and tried something rather bizarre – it looked to all respects as though he were meditating. I wasn't sure whether to laugh or step away, and let him have his… space. He was certainly strange enough for me to be unable to view him as much of the same breed that I had been born, bred and trained to kill. If this was a standard Covenant Elite, I wondered where the war had really started.
Somewhere on Harvest, with gods' knew who in charge. At this point such data was irrelevant. The Covenant wanted Humanity dead and gone, and there was no stopping that effort – even if stopping the onslaught was remotely possible. I had a chance to get inside the enemy mind, and I figured as long as he was an indispensable asset anyway, I might as well. Maybe I wouldn't like what I saw, maybe I wouldn't care.
Maybe he would tell me something important. I sagged to the earth, weary and willing to collapse for the night. It had been a long while since I had gotten any decent rest, what with the constant need for battle-readiness inside the battle cluster I had been with.
I was something of a figurehead for them, their icon and defender. And as the last of them died, I had failed them, crashing into enemy hands. Right now I was as good as dead, to the UNSC. But my signal would never be anything better than MIA. No Spartan was allowed to die. We were immortal, to all those concerned. I could only wish.
FIELD MASTER – G'WI 'CAERVASNEE
In the event that a storm came, I knew the base – if it was raining that far away, too – would be in flight lockdown. No bird smaller than the cruiser would be allowed to fly, excepting only combat situations. Now, I was no pilot, but even I understood why. Branching lightning seared the skies above us, but we both knew it wasn't night. Not anymore. Despite still being a little tired, I had set out anyway – it wasn't a race, so much, and we weren't doing any better than a mere walk.
Not strolling – I had somewhere to be, so I wasn't taking my time. But I was in no real hurry, either. I had just crested a short cliff side, oh all of fifty feet tall or so, and looked back when I realized my companion must think me either insane for wandering this far from my base or I was some kind of Spec Ops. We hadn't really fought much to prove who was superior at it, but my armor ought to have pointed out clearly what I was. He pulled himself over the verge and stood straight, looking back at me, evidently wondering why I was just standing there, staring at him.
Having no words for the fellow, I just shook my head and turned away. We were long past trying to kill one another – I had somehow lost interest in torturing him some, and he'd seemed to come to terms with the idea that he needed me for at least as far as the base, so we weren't at odds quite so much anymore, though I wondered what his plan was once we reached Covenant Central, on this planet.
He had to know he couldn't win, not against that many, even if they all each only shot him with one round. He wouldn't get halfway through before he'd been killed. I walked along the highest ridgeline nearby, pondering what the future held. Mine was bleak, before the Spartan fell on my team. His was bleak, afterwards. Did it matter, though? Did I care? If I had fallen into Human hands, then I didn't doubt for a second that I would have suffered no better a fate. Capture between forces in the war we were having with one another was simply not pretty, no two ways about it. I didn't doubt he knew that – we hadn't ever captured a Spartan before, but there was good reason for that. How I had found the only one to suffer such a fate was a little beyond me – and I found myself wondering if this weren't some kind of prank.
Hadn't I had enough of this bullshit already? If I was stripped of recognition and pushed into the back again even with having produced a Human Elite, I was going to start killing Honor Guards and Prophets. If this was a cruel prank, I was not in the mood to be laughing when the last curtain fell. I had been rejected to the bottom of the ranks for too long to humor such wanton disparagement.
I traced my eyes over the horizon, well aware it was too high to see the cruiser that would otherwise be visible from here, but since the Spartan didn't know that and couldn't see it any better than I could from here, our next showdown would be a while in coming. Given time, I supposed if we didn't arrive anywhere of significance, I would be facing a rather angry Spartan in that he'd think I had been leading him in circles.
There was no agreement that I knew where we were going, though. In truth I only hoped the cruiser was still there – be just my luck, too, that it would have left. It had been five days since the last Human bird was shot down, so there was nothing to really stick around for. The planet wasn't going to get glassed, because there was no significant Human population here. Maybe all of a dozen to a hundred, but that wasn't even enough to propagate the species.
Together my Spartan catch and I made our way across the crest of a hill, following the ridgeline as it snaked along in the general direction of where I was pretty sure the base was. If it wasn't there anymore I was going to be in deep shit – not that the Spartan would be a problem, but that that base was where all the survival supplies were. I didn't have that kind of skill to persist despite them. I hadn't packed anything to last more than a week – worse still, my Spartan friend wasn't going to last even that long. Maybe he'd starve slower due to his augmentations, but one would suppose he would have an even faster metabolism because of them, not a slower one.
You can't feed a faster, stronger, bigger beast on the same ration that you feed the small one. It just doesn't work that way. He was fine for now, but I still was going to run out of supplies here real soon. I didn't know how many days until we reached the blasted base, but I hoped we were close. With the onset of the rainy season, I needed to close that gap fast. No telling what horrors this planet held in store for the unwary and non-natives.
The alone, unwary, and non-native. I heaved a sigh, wishing I was there already but possessed of no method by which to make it. I didn't think the Spartan had much in the way of methods, either, otherwise he would have displayed them already – off me, and away he goes, bereft of need for my guidance across this hilly, rocky terrain that I really didn't know that well.
After all, I hadn't exactly walked out there to that valley-fissure. I'd been flown there in a dropship. My progress drew up short when I realized I had come upon the concave edge of a sharp drop that didn't appear to have a bottom – and it was far, far too wide for me to jump across it. I could hear the rushing water, but it had been spraying in such a manner to make mist so there was no telling just how far down it was, especially since it appeared to be echoing.
The Spartan stepped up beside me, to look down at what he didn't know was a sharp drop until he was on top of it – and before I could protest with even the feeblest of shouts, down we went, right straight into the damn thing.
Stinking Spartan weighed too damn much.
SIERRA 093 – FLINTFalling was a lot like zero g. But it was a sharp drop and a short stop, and we were down. I sank like a rock, my breached suit taking on water like a dehydrated, ravenously thirsting beast. Worse, I couldn't plug the damn hole. Hitting the bottom of the bed several meters from the impact site, I was pushed along through the silt for another four or five meters before stopping – I had no idea where the Elite had gone, but at the moment it hardly mattered. Clawing my way out of the silt was proving really difficult, as the more I pressed from it the deeper I sank into it. I knew there was no way I was going to be able to pull my Mjolnir from the river bottom without some kind of help – a tie-off from the bank or a VTOL with heavy lift gear on it, maybe another Spartan whose suit wasn't full of water.
I was glad my helmet hugged my jawline, else I would have been breathing it by now, and that was the last thing I needed to deal with. Damn but this river bottom was soft as hell! I could find neither hand nor foothold, and my attempts were only throwing up clouds of obscuring silt and burying me deeper in it. I was frustrated already, unable to find anything more solid than the soft, pliable mush I was sinking into or the overly forgiving water I was quickly losing sight of.
At last! Rock bottom was achieved. From there, though, I found I was quite stuck. Not only was I up to my neck in silt, it was in a fast flowing river and I had been reburied within a matter of seconds. I couldn't begin to hope to get out without something else hard enough to push against and strong enough to hold me.
And my suit. The Mjolnir Mark V I was wearing weighed a lot – a lot, a lot. Silt wouldn't have held an unarmored Human child, and here I was, a rather large man added to the fact that I was heavier than most rocks my size due to the armor I wore.
There was simply no solution I could find… and I was still taking on water – I could tell as much because of all the bubbles I was emitting. I could not have possibly trapped that much air in my armpits, there was no question. I was leaking, and filling up, making me even less likely to reach dry shore. I sighed, unwilling to resign myself to this kind of fate… Using as much of my physical power as I could muster under the circumstances, I began to dig and push through the silt, hoping the direction I was going was shoreward. If it wasn't, I would run out of air to lose and then suffocate. So far the seal on my neck was keeping my head out of danger of getting wet, though, which was good… for now.
Just that the suit was breached was irritating and compounding the problem. But I was determined, and I felt like I was making good headway, as I counted my steps. I realized that the river was in the bottom of a carved canyon in a mud hill, but that wasn't going to stop me from finding a way out of the damn water. I wondered what temperature it was, keeping my mind from getting idle as my body churned and plowed. Gods, but this silt layer was fucking deep.
I found something that felt to my foot like a stone, so I stepped on it – and it caved. Gritting my teeth, I pressed on. Maybe I wasn't quite to the shore just yet… no real telling where I was in the river or if I was heading up or downstream instead of left or right, but no river carved by water was ever straight, so if I had that kind of time, maybe I would come upon a curve and walk right out and up onto the bank.
I vowed that as soon as I found it, I was going to give that damned Elite a good talking to about situational awareness. That was if he hadn't drowned, I supposed.
FIELD MASTER - G'WI 'CAERVASNEEMy armor was weighing me down some, but I was managing to maintain a place on the surface, despite. The river was moving really fast, though, and the first fallen something or other I was slammed against I was unable to catch and hold to. The second, though, I caught, then was wrapped around it by the force of the tide. Impact hurt, but the force of the press after impact was almost as bad. It felt like a ton and a half of pressure was aimed at the small of my back, and I wondered at the obstruction I was against. How come it wasn't moving, too?
I spent what felt like an eternity clawing my way out of that water, but once I was out and on the bank, I got a good look at the nature of the beast. It was rushing like it was scared shitless of something back behind it, and there was somewhere safe up ahead. And there was a lot of it. But something uncharacteristic of flood waters, though, was it was painfully clear… I could see the bottom… and then it vanished, as silt began to fill the clarity with murk.
"Spartan." I said, to myself, realizing it must have been him stirring it up when he hit the bottom of the river in that armor of his. Humans didn't tend to sink any more than Sangheili did, but for the most part, this one in particular was wearing some pretty heavy gear. He likely had sunk at an angle, though, for the push of the tide.
But if I could backtrack in any kind of time, I could probably find him, and drag his heavy carcass out. Moving into a trot, I covered a considerable amount of distance back along the way I had come, but I never saw any end to the amount of silt that Spartan was throwing up. I began to wonder if he wasn't rolling along on the bottom, or something. Coming upon a hill which the river had cut the middle right out of, I hesitated, and looked into the carved slot, wondering if going up and down again the other side would cause me to go right around him and miss him entirely.
This posed an interesting problem. Shaking my head, I looked back at the silt, which here was coloring the water. It looked now more like a moving ribbon of dirt than flowing water, there was so much of it all.
Then, as if the generator passed me by, it stopped. There was still silt – and a lot of it – down past me, but right where I was had cleared again. And looking down through the water I could just make out a wavering form colored green in the middle of that cloud of dirt. I laughed. Taking a rather watery stroll, wasn't he?
Taking my rappelling line, I tied it off to a thick rock that looked like it was well rooted, and jumped in, aiming for the bottom. Now I wasn't flailing this way and that, I was able to control my motions more, especially since I better understood the nature and power of the water I was in. Swimming had always come naturally to me – I was faster in the water than I was on land, and no one I had met had been able to out do me. Coming within the Spartan's path, I squinted against the massive amounts of dirt I had to look through, waiting poised to strike as my target came to me.
We had met under better circumstances – but this time, I was in better control of the situation, and the water wasn't fixing to blow up. I caught him by his shoulders, and began to recoil along the rappelling line I had strung out, taking him up to shore. At first he fought me, which made it hard to hang onto him, but after he'd apparently realized who and what I was, he let me drag him out of the water. Presumptuous, suspicious fellow.
Once his visor made it above the water line, he took over, and pulled his own self up and out. I guessed he'd been blind in all that silt, unable to tell up from down or left from right, but now he could tell where he was again, he resumed normal function. Personally, I felt bruised. I took my rappelling line from the rock, and wound it up again, restoring it to its place on my belt with the rest of my equipment.
The Spartan just stood there, watching as the water drained from his suit through the hole his ship had put in him. I looked at that, and shuddered. It looked too much like a clear version of the gush of blood that had come out, but this time it wasn't just one gush – it was pouring, and it didn't look inclined to stop.
"Are you done with unnecessary adventures and detours?" I asked. He didn't reply. "Come on, we still have ground to cover." I turned, and – limping slightly now – walked away, aiming for the ridge on the horizon that masked where the cruiser was hanging in the sky. It was much closer now, but we'd taken an easy half mile sideways detour, so there was no telling if we would encounter half the things I had seen from the high knoll back the way we had come. It could be better, could be worse. Either way, I was not going to stand here all day and become predator food when I died of starvation… or drowned in the Spartan's next underwater stroll.
I checked once to see and he was following me again, probably sloshing along rather heavily as much of the water that had gotten into his suit had sunk past the point in his armor where there was an exit to escape through. He was working at what I supposed was probably a latch on one glove, maybe to take it off long enough to drain that sleeve, and it was highly likely he was going to later do his boots the same way whenever I decided to stop again. Sure enough, a spray of almost pressurized water began to come from the area before he'd gotten it completely loose, and then it gushed out and spent a moment dripping before he resealed the thing.
We closed the last mile and a half to the mountain wall I was heading to that day, but the moment I caught sight of the aft of the cruiser I was overjoyed to see hadn't left without me after all, I stopped moving, and made as if I thought I was suddenly very lost. Turning to look back at the Spartan, I wondered how I was going to handle this part of the journey – he'd made himself rather clear when he'd first woke up after we'd met.
Either he was going to die, or I was, but he wouldn't have it any other way. I frowned meaningfully at him, but he wasn't looking at me. He was looking past me. When he made that slight turn of his head to look at me, though, I could almost hear his expression; I'd stopped too late, and he'd seen the cruiser. He didn't need me anymore, and here our joint efforts would cease. I curled my hand around the grip of my t-25DER, wondering how things would really play out. It didn't take a genius to know that he wasn't going to just allow me to walk him in there and hand him over – Spartans fought to the death, and this one had been more forgiving than any of his brothers had been already – his chivalry and polite demeanor was due to end any moment now.
He didn't move, but I didn't expect him to either. If I turned my back now, he would break it, but I couldn't just stand here all the rest of the day. In the distance, back the way we'd come, thunder crackled across the sky, the areas we'd traveled under heavy rains. The mountains we were now in would hold back the clouds and the rain for a long, long time. But I wasn't concerned for the rain. I was more likely to be killed by this Spartan than hit by lightning, and we both knew it.
He appeared to take a breath, thinking the situation over; I had no idea where he was going to wind up, though, and the last thing I was going to humor was anything that would leave me at the bottom while he killed millions more and escaped laughing at me. I could be labeled a heretic and executed for allowing that. I tasted my mandibles, aware we both had old injuries that had not been allowed to heal, and aware he was probably the better of us at combat – even mere hand combat, since he didn't have any of his weapons.
"Don't try it." I said, bringing the rifle up at him. He looked at it, then at my face, then back at the rifle. I got the impression he thought of the gesture as my offering to give it to him, even though we both knew I was doing no such thing. Spartans tended to look upon enemy entrenchments as weapons' depos. I had never felt more a fool for taking him along this far when I had had him at my mercy back at the crash site.
He seemed to smile an evil smile at me, like he had just had the same thought. I backed up a step. Mistake; his reaction was better than lightning. It was superlumenal. We connected right as I pulled the firing stud on my t-25DER, and it fired three wild shots into the air before being slammed from my hand as his grip found that wrist and we dropped together, that arm being struck against the ground in an effort to do just that – unseat the gun. We proceeded to pound on one another, shielding mechanisms catching most of the first part of our tussle, me snarling rather loudly at him.
He had no idea how much I did not want to die, did he? I freed my gunhand and balled it into a fist, to use it to pummel his visor, which drummed his head backwards. I got him off of me, and coiled a leg to kick him a distance. Clawing my sword from my belt, he clawed it from my hand, and we fought over it until I got it to activate, at which point I wrenched his wrist, and raked it across his energy shielding; that was the last of it, though, and they caved, leaving a scoring mark across his chest armor and the scent of hot metal vapor in the air. He backed off a step or two, and looked down at it briefly, before looking back at me, and raising his fists again.
I hunched, sword forward, and began to circle. My t-25DER was nowhere I could see it, but the reason I was circling him was not to make him turn, but because I was in no mood to humor him while I looked for it by some other method. After coming about halfway around, he suddenly dropped into a roll, and came up from a knee with it in hand – how I had missed it was beyond me, but he unloaded it until it overheated at me, nearly all of his shots hitting not because he was good at rushed aims, but because I had seen him pick it up and seen that action coming – and I was charging in, closing the gap.
I was not by any means going to let him have me like that, but my own weapon was rather short range. We connected badly yet again, and I tore at his armored hide with the blade, as he wrestled to get me away from him. Finally, he found a new method I hadn't ever seen before – he deliberately fell over backwards, but since I was heading at him, he stuck his feet up and I went right over his head onto mine, following my momentum on the leveraging pivots of his legs. I crashed hard, and rolled to one side, trying to shake off the agony of landing wrong. I was a little surprised I hadn't broken my head or my neck with that move, but since I hadn't, I didn't have time to dwell.
So trembling for a pain I was trying to ignore, I drove back to my hooves, and came about, determined not to let him do that to me again. He had rolled to one side, and come upright already by that point, as if he'd never been down. Slapping my t-25DER once or twice as the venting mechanism closed again, he re-aimed it at me, but this time I was much closer, and I met the first and only shot he managed to get off, before we connected yet again. My first swing missed completely when he pulled over backwards into an odd looking flip, but he hit with his hands, coiled, and came back, slamming both feet into my chest directly and knocking me back as he jumped back to his feet. Damn, I could learn a ton from this guy. I hit my back and pulled my legs over my head, so I landed on my knees facing him, though a bit far from him for comfort, considering he was the one with the gun. From my knees, though, I easily thrust forward, sword first, and the gap between us closed yet again. I hit shielding again, but it caved early, as it had not fully recharged yet. Past that, I hit his armor, and then we both hit dirt, my free hand wrapped around the wrist of the hand that held my t-25DER, my sword held against his neck.
Neither of us moved, but I was feeling really quite dizzy by this point, after having landed on my head and then permitted to let the injury assert itself once the rush of battle was past. I fought to keep my head, even as the image of the Spartan before me swam and ran like wet paint. I worried that I would pass out, and then he'd just push me away and be on his merry way, but things didn't work out quite that way.
Right as I thought I was done, I heard running steps. I looked up, in time to see more of my own on approach… I barely recognized them as such, though, more blobs of running color than starkly outlined beings. The Spartan beneath me saw them too – but when he pushed, I had no coherency to push back, and he pushed me off before I was even completely gone. The last thing I saw was the outbreak of plasma fire exchanging between the Spartan and my reinforcements, before it all pooled and stirred into a bleak grey before turning black and swallowing me whole.
I had never seen such depth to a color before.
SIERRA 093 - FLINTHe wasn't that good at fighting, but he was hell as for adaptation and absorption learning. With each second he learned something new from me, coiling, colliding, moving past and around. I just couldn't move the same way twice, and my mistake at revision of an old motion got me pinned to the ground under threat of decapitation with the Elite on top of me. He learned fast – but even as I stared up at him, wondering at his rather placid expression, I began to realize his adaptation mode of fighting hadn't served him as well as it had seemed to – he was suffering, likely from the move where I had made him land on his head.
Not one to judge such things, but pretty certain nonetheless, I could have sworn his eyes had un-focused on me, and he kept staring at me as if trying to see me. Like I had disappeared in a swirl of colors. When he looked up to try to see the Covenant forces coming to investigate the shots fired between us, I knew precisely what was wrong. He didn't see them, either – and was fighting a losing battle to retain consciousness. This Elite was gone, he just didn't know it yet.
Testing, I pushed up on his swordarm, and none too soon. He verily drooped, as he rolled off of me, settling in the dust as still as if dead. Had I reacted later, he might have dropped that sword on me and cut my head right off without even meaning to. Spilled in the dust, though, I almost felt bad for him; having had better than a week to get to know him, it was almost as if being struck with the realization that after all that time playing nice to one another while we amended our collective situations had gone completely without recognition when our paths sought to separate. He only wanted to get back to where he belonged – with his Covenant. The same could be said for me. I wanted to go back to the UNSC, and here, arrived at the base that had likely deployed my Elite companion, was a ticket for each of us. They would collect him and keep him with them, while I could possibly kill a pilot or two, steal a bird, and fly home.
He hadn't tried to kill me even once.
His friends weren't so understanding, though, and rushed at the scene with murder in their eyes. They saw me shove the Elite off me, and must have assumed I had killed him. I might have, there was no way to know without having several quiet moments to check. But these boys weren't going to let me. More Elites than I had ever seen in one place at once came to greet me, and my only option was to take the Plasma Rifle my companion had carried and shoot back while dodging for cover.
I counted eleven Elites, better than twenty five Grunts, and a half dozen Jackals, all of them swarming my position with plasma and bolt fire. Overcharges zoomed past my helmet, sizzling, but I still hadn't recharged from the times my own escort had hit me, and if one of those things hit me, it would burn right through my armor.
I could still feel the water from the bottom of my ribs down sloshing in my suit, but I took up most of the interior, so there might have been a gallon in there, at best – I spared a moment to shoot down a pair of Grunts, and suffered six hits from a well-aimed Carbine, which popped the last of my barely recharged shields and punctured a greave. Oddly, I never felt it hit skin or bone after the suit breached again, but a small stream of water poured across my combat shoe. Reaching my position at last, I was now surrounded, and I threw a Grunt into an Elite, then scooped up another to mow down those annoying Jackals. Something slammed hard into my back, and staggered me forwards, right into another Elite, who snarled something at me that wasn't English, punched me so I spun on a foot, and hit dirt. I sent a foot into his knee, knocking him back and down, before jumping back up in time to get covered in a dog pile of Grunts, all of them screeching and clawing at my armor.
They proved too heavy at once to hold, and it drug me to my knees, even as I tried to swat them off, the Plasma Rifle I had once had in hand now long lost. Somehow I managed to scrape most of them off my upper body, and then I kicked the rest free before something I never saw coming and still can't identify slammed into the side of my helmet, rattling me badly enough inside my armor to cause me to black out instantly.
I had never felt less concerned for my own self than right then, though, for some reason wondering what would become of the Elite that had pulled me from certain death so many miles ago.
If they left us both for dead, I could probably amend some of the situation. But if they only left him for dead while carting me off to see a Prophet, I knew I was going to be really peeved. It would prove that ground pounders on both sides of this gods-rot war were no more than being used, little puppets made to suffer and die while the upper echelons watched from afar.
Like chess.
FIELD MASTER – G'WI 'CAERVASNEEI remember hearing voices, but they didn't register and I gave them no thought for the first several moments before it occurred to me to wonder about them. Naturally, assuming they were ally, my first wonder was to wonder where I was.
I couldn't believe the amount of effort it took just to get my eyes to open, though – by the Prophets that took monumental effort! And I thought moving was hard. This was insane. Groggily, I blinked a few times as the blur cleared from my eyes, and I sought to look around. Oh. I knew what this was. I'd been here enough times to know, I supposed, at a glance. It wasn't that I spent all my time in a medical bay, but I hadn't been without injury even if my battle experience was nil. Sometimes things just go awry without any enemy to help them along, and that was life.
A Healer approached, and took the readings from the monitoring equipment over my head, then turned away before looking at them, making a startled noise, and turning back, this time to actually look at me. I grinned at her, weakly. Not the most observant type, she wasn't, but I was tickled. She ignored me, after that, leaving with the readings to gods knew where, and leaving me to explore my new surroundings. All of my extraneous body parts checked in well enough, and I found myself pleasingly whole; which shouldn't have really surprised me much, but it was still nice to know.
My head felt oddly numb, like it ought to hurt but instead it wasn't… an odd sensation, to be sure, and it left me dizzy as hell. I did manage to sit myself up, though, pressing against the medical flat I had been lain on. My armor was gone, but medical staff tend to remove that sort of thing for ease of work, and again I was not surprised. Seated now, I looked around at my surroundings, and found the area surprisingly empty – save exactly one other Sangheili warrior, much like myself. He was nearby, relatively, within speaking distance I supposed, but though unlike me his injury was a tad more obvious, he wasn't out cold nor acting dizzy like I felt.
I supposed it might be because his wasn't a head injury. Motion attracts the eye, as all well know, and my sitting up caught his attention, so when I looked at him, he was already looking back at me, though in silence.
"Hello." I called.
"They said you might not remember who you were." He answered.
Well! That was certainly not the friendliest thing to start a conversation with. "Why?" I asked.
"Due to the nature of your injury." He elaborated, though it sounded more like he was telling me for his own benefit. Like he didn't expect me to understand. "They said it was severe. You spent more than three hours just in surgery."
I balked. Surgery! Had I hit my head that badly? "What for?" I asked.
He shrugged, and shook his head, more talking to himself. I wondered if he was really answering me or just telling a story how he'd heard it. "Something about sub-cranial swelling as well as a number of skeletal fractures… you got hit pretty hard, I'd warrant." He looked over at me, then, as if expecting some kind of reaction.
I ran a hand over the back of my head, wondering if there would be a giant bandage there. I didn't find one, but I did find a pattern of stitches back there. Yeah, I sighed, my head had been opened. I frowned. "What happened?"
He didn't answer.
"I remember landing on my head, but I don't remember it being that bad." I added, looking at him. "I got back up and kept fighting."
"You know, it's not easy to fight a Spartan and win – and three squadrons worth of witnesses speak as testament to that. You've proven yourself quite the warrior. You were in sight long before anyone was close enough to help you. They all saw how well you held your own all by yourself against that Human Spartan."
I focused on him. "What happened to him?"
"What?" He asked, as though he didn't understand.
"He was supposed to be my captive, until he managed to steal my t-25DER from me and make a nuisance of himself. I had hoped to deliver him alive…" I found my tone was rather tart, even though I didn't know if this fellow had even been there.
"He's alive, by the way… we decided to take him that way when it proved an option." He offered, looking at me like he was wondering why I was acting like I was. "He took a great deal of suppression to neutralize his fighting ability. He's currently in isolation in the brig sector."
I looked at him oddly, then. "We?"
"I was there." He continued, half-smiling as if in awe of me. "I saw you fighting him, I saw you fall. It's a wonder you're alive, considering what he did to you. Forerunners know I could not have held half as well against him for half as long. You were truly a sight to see."
I could only grunt in partially irritated, partially disinterested nonchalance. Sight to see! Ha! I hadn't had any combat experience at all ever before, and now suddenly I'm the center of attention for all achievement and accolade. I had to scoff at the idea. No, I was not about to be led to believe I was some great warrior among great warriors, not when all before I wasn't even worthy of being allowed to fight at all. I was not about to let them lead me on and pump my ego (what there was left of it) only to later let me down and then step on me on their way past as they turned their backs and walked away.
He did shut up, though, and give me my peace, at least for a time. I knew fully that I was still bruised from the escapade in the river, as well as the short beating the Spartan and I had exchanged. I held my face in my hands for a time, feeling some of them and wondering why I wasn't feeling others of them. Despite this, I felt my whole body hurt, and I was glad to be back in Covenant controlled territory, where fighting was not liable to happen.
I heard the doors open, and several sets of hooves walk through, before it closed and the new arrivals all gathered around me. I could feel my skin crawling as they all looked at me, so I lifted my head to look back at them, scanning their faces one at a time and counting them as well as noting rank and position.
Number four, the final one on the right, was wearing golden armor. I felt myself subconsciously shrink away from him, wondering if I was going to be killed for allowing the Spartan to beat on that other dispatch of warriors. His expression wasn't terribly unkind, though, and it made me wonder why he was here – an Imperial Admiral, come to see little, insignificant, unimportant me. The Ship Master was there, too – and he appeared more contemplating the sight of me than anything else.
Finally, the Admiral spoke. "They tell me your name is G'wi Caervasnee."
Meekly, I nodded.
"You are born of a low House, warrior. I am amazed. None previous of your bloodline have displayed such prowess in battle. What have you to say for yourself?"
I spent several minutes just staring at him; he had just insulted me and then honored me all in the same breath. Coming from an Imperial Admiral, likely bred off a bloodline riddled with the rank, this was really something. Honestly, I found myself a little speechless…
"Nothing at all?" He asked, cocking his head.
"N… no, sir… I… am unsure how to respond at all." I admitted.
"Your name has been submitted for review by the Council. Congratulations, Caervasnee. You've been offered a position many thousands covet and never attain; the rank of Zealot among the members of the Honor Guard attending the High Council."
I don't know if I fainted or not, but the rest of the day escaped my memory. I have no idea what I said or if I even said anything at all… in truth I'm a little amazed I recall the entirety of what he said, since the very first sentence – that I was under review by the Council – blew my poor battered mind right out of the water.
Most of the next week went more the same way – I knew I was lucid, knew I was coherent, knew what I was doing while I was doing it at the time, but the memory didn't really stick to me, creating something of a blur. My whole life, I suppose, was flashing before my eyes. And it was dull, indeed. I spent most of the time between the conversation in the medical bay and arrival of our cruiser at somewhere else – notably High Charity – trying to wrap my mind around the basic concept. I never saw the Spartan the whole time, but I had the impression I wasn't supposed to.
Yet. The whole crew was abuzz, whispering and muttering to themselves, but everyone was respectfully quiet around me – worse still, I had a sinking, foreboding feeling growing in my gut because everyone's persistent reluctance to speak to me had grown to a total refusal. I just knew it was because they were going to kill me in my sleep and then replace me with some more worthy, honorable warrior who they thought would make a halfway decent Zealot. Gods knew who ever they chose would be better than me, but they had no idea how much I did not want to die.
I didn't sleep, couldn't sleep, barely ate. I felt more alien and segregated among my own than I ever had, forced to watch them with a cautious, wary eye and my own back because there was no one I could trust to watch it for me. I tried to maintain a normal duty attendance, but in the end I really spent more time hiding from them all sealed behind the door to my quarters than doing anything else, watching it with a paranoid delusion, my t-25DER in my hand. I would spend all night like this, just knowing they would come through it any moment and take me away to erase me.
I was born of a low House, and the Imperial Admiral had made that observation first. Would they want us to stay low? Would they dare allow us ascension among the upper cultural echelons, to rub elbows with the most honored Houses?
Alone I had accomplished what it took generations and legions of other Houses' members to accomplish, and for it I guess I was afraid I would be called out and condemned for something along the lines of faking something to make myself and my bloodline look worthy. We had certainly been at the low end for hundreds of generations. I waited, watched, and wondered, until at last we arrived. I was sleep deprived, a little gaunt for lack of sustenance intake, and jittery as hell. I suppose I didn't look like much, either, especially when the Imperial Admiral came to get me from the hall route I was assigned on security duty to himself. The expression on his face when he first saw me around the far corner made me wonder if I had grown a second head – even though I was sure I would have noticed had I.
He approached, his attendants at his elbows, both of them looking at me with that same expression he wore himself. They all thought I looked like hell. I thought they all looked like my executioners. The expression on the Admiral's face turned to inquisitive, then contemplative, as he stopped his approach and watched as I backed slowly away from them, watching them with what must have been a rather wild look in my eye. I was certainly scared of them.
I arrived at a comfortable distance, and hesitated, though I was sure that my quivering muscles were very ready to propel me along at a decent speed should I choose to bolt. The Admiral shook his head, and waved at both his attendants, then at me, without a word. I took exactly one running step in the opposite direction when I saw them coming for me, before they were suddenly somehow upon me, and holding me between them. All my fears came to play in that moment, as I became convinced my death had at last come to call, and I would be dead in a matter of mere seconds. Despite this, and despite how very much I wanted to live, instead of overwhelming panic, all I felt was a settling sense of calm.
I looked the Admiral in the eye, at peace with my situation. I had never before felt so calm in my life than right then, when I felt I was going to die without options to the contrary. He stepped forward, then, confident I wasn't going to get away while he tried to speak. I knew I was going nowhere. His aides had been too well toned and trained to be fought off, especially in my condition. I knew I was doing rather poorly in the health department, knew I was not as strong as I could have been.
Knew… and didn't care. He never said a word to me, and I none to him. But he turned, and we followed him back the way he came, my escorts and I. Passing crew looked after us, their silent stares not unlike the ones they gave to heretics and rebels. I ignored them – if this was going to be the end of me, there was no shame in doing it with dignity. Instead, though, we made our way through the ship to the medical bay again – puzzling me for a moment. I sat still as the Healers looked me over, unable to find any reason why I looked the way I did.
The Admiral left me there, locked there in the medical for the following three days. On the fourth he returned, and while I looked better more for my inability to refuse the medics, I felt no different. My peace had slowly begun to fade, as I came to realize it wasn't over – not yet. But I retained my calm, retained my composure, and even as they dressed me in armor that was both shaped and colored foreign to me, I stood resolute that I would not be made to snivel or beg in the end. Honored or not, I was still a proud warrior, and I was going to go with my head high.
The Imperial Admiral escorted me from the ship, after I was suitably clad to his tastes, and out onto the vast decks of High Charity. There, we chose our path through intermittent sections of occupied and abandoned parts of the city – until we finally arrived at a Proclamation Chamber. I had seen one or two in the past, but this was the biggest one I had ever seen – the far corners were vast indeed, and it was beyond packed with people. When I stepped out onto the gravity lift that would take us down, to the area where the main stage was located, the whole crowded room fell hushed, as if in reverence like when a Prophet entered a room.
As our booted hooves touched the deck at last, the Admiral and I took a knee before not one but three of the Holy Appointed. On a normal day I would have been shocked to see that many Prophets in one place at one time. Today I was still encased in an iron shell of calm and cool. I doubted that if riot broke out I would lose it, either. No one moved, no one breathed. At the center Prophet's beckon, we in attendance to their presence stood straight again, and faced them. I wasn't sure, but I was pretty convinced there were five of us – the Imperial Admiral and I, and three more others behind us, in staggered formation.
I listened with half an ear as the Prophets proclaimed their testimonies of gods and Great Journeys, of salvation and damnation. My attention centered when their words changed, and the one in the center turned in his hovering throne to look directly at me. His voice boomed across the vast chamber with electronic aid as he raised his arms, then lowered them, and pointed one long finger at me.
I didn't move, but between the three others in the back, I was soon subject to a rather public redressing – and when they stepped back, my more or less colorless armor had been replaced with gold. It was highly decorated, sporting an excess of décor and design, as well as a small number of unnecessary protrusions from various places – the tops of my shoulders, for one. Lastly, the center Prophet floated closer to me, taking in hand something that I had thought at first was just part of his own overly decorative outfit, and holding it up first for all to see – as if they had vision that good – and then extending it towards me.
I only recognized it at that point – it was a helmet. With a high crest and low cheeks, a sculpted brow and broad, forked nose plate, this was the official design of the ceremonial garb worn by the Honor Guard. The ranks were usually composed of the descendants of the first Honor Guards, as sons and grand sons were trained and groomed to take on their father's places as the most honored, most dangerous Sangheili warriors in the Covenant. I was hardly that, but I accepted the helm anyway. I would only make them all mad by refusing, especially since it would imply I thought badly of the Prophet's own decisions. Turning it over, I bowed my head to settle it where it belonged, and found it not as heavy or unwieldy as I thought it must be, so when I looked up again it was past the lip of the helm of an Honor Guard Zealot.
That's what I was.
SIERRA 093 - FLINTI had no idea what they thought they were up to, but the more they got in my way the more of them got hurt. I was, admittedly, a little pissed off, and greatly desiring a weapon. Covenant creatures swarmed along outside, where I could see them, but for as much as my odd energy bondings hindered my movements, they did not totally deny them. And the great hairy beasts that looked a lot like a cross between a dog, a pig, and an ape just kept shoving me back every time I got close enough to really hit one.
Their tongue was harsh and guttural, unlike the Elite's more smooth and sable language. I had heard them speaking in it before, had wondered at it's almost song-like nature, their deep bass voices resonating like guitars and drums. These beasts here sounded more a lot like grunts and growls, like some rabid animal that can't complete a single coherent thought. But they were dragging me, kicking and fighting, along a narrow corridor out towards somewhere where I could swear there must be millions of Covenant creatures, of all races, howling and screaming in either agony or cheer.
The closer we got to that last door, the louder it got. When it opened, all the brutish creatures dragging me made the same disgusted expression – and I grimaced, unable to take such a blast of sound very well. Once the shock of introduction was past, though, and I was recovered, it didn't seem so loud, but merely constant as well as distant. We stepped across an unsupported platform with a gravity lift at the far edge in it, and into the glowing hole in the floor – instead of falling an impossible distance to all of our deaths, we descended slowly in a controlled manner so we all retained our upright postures.
I did, however, manage to twist from one's grasp long enough to land a double-foot kick in another, and to my satisfaction, it knocked the beast completely from the gravity field, and he fell flailing and screaming off to his death while the rest of them and me slowed to a stop on another unsupported platform that wasn't wide enough to have caught that other creature – the brute holding my elbows thrust me forward so I tumbled to a knee and then slid a yard on my side, almost but not quite freeing me. I jumped back to my feet and slammed my bound fists into the one I had been thrown at, knocking him back a step. I followed this up with an uppercut and then a left hook, then kicked his knee so it broke, and without giving him time to compensate or react, I had kicked him right off the edge.
Directly, I was seized again from behind, and a fist slammed into the side of my helmet, stunning me and making me dizzy long enough for them to separate my hands and hang them in the air in what appeared to me to be some kind of energy holding field. No matter how I pulled, they refused to come free, so I was stuck facing the biggest crowd of Covenant soldiers I had ever seen, with my hands up at my sides at eye level.
I was rather close to the far edge of the platform, though, which made for the fate of the next hirsute brute that got in front of me close enough for me to kick. He wouldn't have been hurt much except that I had put all my power into that impact, and he dropped and rolled right off the edge, clawing at the decking so he left scratch marks in the metal.
That one howled louder when he found freefall, than the last one I had done that to. I twisted and pulled, straining to be free of whatever was holding my wrists in that damned energy field. I stressed their hold with all my might, determined to be freed, digging the heels of my Mjolnir Mark V armor deep into the metal I stood on, pressing with all I had backwards from the direction I was attached at.
My gaze was drawn from my tightly balled fists when a pair of golden figures and an airborne module appeared in my peripheral. Twisting against my bondings still, I watched as a pair of decorated Elites circled me, standing just out of range. I wasn't certain, but I had the distinct feeling there was a Prophet behind me. I'd never seen one before, and at current I still had not, but the feeling was quite strong.
I paused my pulling to study the more extravagantly dressed of the two golden Elites, sure I had seen that one before somewhere. I don't know where I got that idea, don't know what made me think that, but I just knew I was certain about having known that particular Elite from somewhere else. I just couldn't pinpoint where or when. I knew I was looking at an Honor Guard, but I hadn't ever needed to kill any of those before – never been near enough to someone important enough to have to. I had seen only a recon photograph of them.
I turned my head to see the other when it spoke to me, in English. "You are going to die a horrible death, Human. I hope you are at peace with your heathen gods. Because all of your pathetic kind will watch this moment in horror and awe as they witness what the Holy Covenant is willing to do to ensure none of your scourging species mars the Path of Reclamation when the Great Journey begins."
I looked back at the other one – he was being unusually quiet. "Okay." I said, thinking. So they were going to film this event… I had to get out of here. Who was that, though??
"We will enjoy listening to you scream, Human. And we will enjoy watching you as you die slowly and painfully." He motioned at his companion, and then left – but despite what I was sure was a come-hither motion being made, the Honor Guard didn't budge. He just stood there, staring at me with a look in his dark golden eyes that I just couldn't read. The familiar nagging in the back of my head was being awful persistent, but I still couldn't identify the fellow. I was still unsure how I could claim to even have known an Elite before anyway – of any rank or position.
The yellow bracelets that circled my wrists had an odd luminescence, but I didn't notice them much until something a lot like a branch of lightning reached out from the far towering column to my left – and then another from the one on my right – and touched those bracelets, lighting them up like the overhead lamps on the starship bulkheads. I looked up at one, then at the other, then back at that Honor Guard, feeling a sudden overwhelming sense of betrayal. It was compounded by the feeling of not knowing why, or where it came from.
Fire lit up inside those bracelets, and inside of a heartbeat it had traveled through my armor and my arms, connecting in the middle in my chest cavity. I got out exactly one agonized gasp before everything went a bright white, and then faded through gray to black as I felt my body sagging against the hold on my hands.
HONOR GUARD ZEALOT – G'WI 'CAERVASNEEIt was the same methods used to humiliate and torture heretics. Creatures of the Covenant had been subjected to it over the ages without much incident. As I stood there, watching my Spartan staring back at me, I got the feeling something wasn't quite right. When the charge pylons lit up, he appeared more worried than afraid – and when he looked back at me, despite the dark visor I could sense his expression.
How could you let them do this to me?
I dared not move, though, even as I was forced to watch as the first spike lanced down, and crawling lines of electricity formed across his armored hide. They had disabled his shielding some time ago, and these lines were wrought of the damaging touch of the electric charge pylons. He stiffened, without cry, jerked sideways once, and fell limp.
The crowd fell silent, as if noncomprehending what had gone wrong. But I knew. Standing there in my new armor, wearing my new rank, I had just watched as the Covenant I worked for condemned the one that had brought me that station, and then stood there, doing nothing, as they killed him. Aside that no one had wanted him to die so suddenly, I felt my chest tighten as my expression slowly turned to combined remorse and shame. After everything, knowing a Human for a month had changed my outlook, and here I stood, witness to his death. There was no questioning this fact – Humans didn't operate with the same mechanism the rest of us did.
The electric shock from one side might have been tolerable, but the branches had traveled down both arms, and connected in the center – right exactly where, I noted from memory, the heart was.
Doubtless the charge had stopped it cold, leaving him limp and unresponsive as the rest of his body followed and shut down, leaving nothing more than a carcass for the Covenant to stare at in denial. This whole event had been shaped around the Spartan's demise taking most of the day. But as the pylons were shut off, no one said a word, each aware almost instinctually what had happened – already many in the crowds had begun to file away, leaving for lack of interest in watching a Human hang dead from energy cuffs.
The Prophet and his Guard left shortly, too, as the Jiralhanae attending the prisoner were dismissed for lack of their brute force being needed. It only took an hour, spare a few minutes or so, for the entire Proclamation Chamber to empty, until it was only myself, the Spartan, and the Imperial Admiral.
I stayed where I was, he stayed where he was. I looked past the Spartan's shoulder, at the Admiral, then bowed my head. It felt as though I had sacrificed the only friend I had ever been granted for a position I hadn't wanted. When I looked up, all I saw was the Admiral's slowly retreating back, his cape swaying with his steps, the edges tugged at lightly by the artificial breeze generated by the fact that the room was so huge.
Looking back at the Spartan, I stepped forward, and wrapped an arm around his chest, before reaching up and disengaging the cuffs one at a time, so he hung draped over my arm. Scooping my other arm under his knees, I turned from the place, and carried him from the site of his end, through the door and away into the depths of High Charity's halls and corridors.
The look he had given me still haunted me, each step taken an echo of that sentiment. How could you let them do this to me? The question, unasked, remained unanswered. I was at fault, I was to blame, and all he had ever asked of me was to leave him be, to let him go home. I was home… and had never felt more alien to this place. He was dead, now… as much gone home as anyone ever could be.
But I felt responsible. I felt as though I had sacrificed my own brother for personal gain, one of my own, an honored Sangheili warrior. He was beyond heavy as hell, but I don't know that I noticed, so much, as the only thing I could truly feel was my regret, and my shame. He had asked only for a chance at freedom, and instead I had condemned him. It was odd to me that I would have cared, enough to feel a traitor when he was killed, when just a month ago I would have shot him myself just for being Human.
Amazing what a month socializing with the enemy can do.
I reached my destination easily enough, quickly enough, and paused to look up and around at my surroundings. Here lay the vanguard of the Great Journey – everything the Covenant stood for, each one from first to last; I stood in the Mausoleum of the Arbiter. The one in my arms now could not have stood for such a worthier cause as any of the rest, if not a more worthy one. He had invested in me a wonder, a curiosity, a driving puzzle that had me in doubt of all I had ever believed.
Humans, the Prophets claimed, were a manifestation of evil. They had to be eradicated. Could they be, truly, if even the ones the race had bred for war were like this one? Could they be truly evil, truly manifested to destroy all things great and good in this life, when after everything, all the dead and more to die, the threats and promises… after what I had done – he had looked at me with betrayal in his eyes, not hatred. Even though I had never seen them, the look reflected through that dark visor was etched into my soul now, because I understood.
I laid him on the bed of a stasis module, and watched as it slid closed, the indicator lights on the outside activating and indicating stasis had been engaged successfully. Beside him lay the bodies of all those Arbiters who had been created and consumed in times of great crisis, much like now. Even if he would never gain recognition as such, he was as much an Arbiter as they had been, even if the best he'd done was break the communication gap between our respective races, making room for something no one had ever before considered; that maybe, just maybe, the Prophets might be wrong.
I turned as my gaze followed the rows of modules along the wall, the mostly dark chamber reflecting the indicator lights for each. Soft, light footsteps echoed around the place, but I didn't turn. I knew who it was. He'd done enough walking around while I was there for me to know who it was. He walked with a two-four beat, with something of an odd clicking on the right side where he limped. The Imperial Admiral had been wounded rather badly at one point in his past, making room for a bio-electric limb. Said limb happened to be his right leg, from the knee down. The combat shoe for that hoof clicked on the inside, as a result, when normal hoof-nail would not have.
He stopped, a yard from where I stood, barely within my peripheral. "You are a peculiar warrior, Caervasnee." He spoke, softly so as not to echo. "I do not pretend to know you."
I didn't even try to answer. Nothing I said now or ever would change anything. The war with the Humans would continue, because I was not a Prophet – and anyone who did not agree with the Prophets was a heretic, and later soon dead, too.
"I do not presume to insult your honor, but I had wondered why it appears to me that your mourn for the death of that Human?"
I turned my head, then, to look at him.
"There is more, isn't there?" He pressed.
I made neither expression nor attempt at words.
"Barely have you a day in your new armor and you seek to shed it?" He questioned.
My mind hurt too much for this nonsense – before he could realize what was about to happen to him, I had torn the ceremonial sword from my belt and sent its blade through him, laying him across the floor in pieces. I stood over his decapitated body for a time before shutting it off again, and turning away. No one understood me – and I was not presumptuous enough to think they ever might. I was already a traitor to my own soul, so any other loyalties I held were subject to revision.
I left the Mausoleum, and the Spartan I had placed in its care, heading back through the halls alone again. If and when someone found the body of that Imperial Admiral, they would never know who had killed him; I was above suspicion now, most honored and revered. Many coveted my position, and few obtained it. But I was not one of the Honor Guard who stood statute and watched as horrors were committed by the ones around me. No, I was going to be the one that acted, the one who made things better, the one that ensured no more of the same could ever haunt me again.
The price was high, and it had been paid in full. I wasn't going to let the gain be wasted by inaction. The age of prejudice was over for me, and in the name of one I had never truly known and knew not the name of, there was hell to pay. I already knew what it was like to suffer at the bottom, already had endured enough brutality and nonchalant neglect to understand how nothing would be served by standing idle and waiting for someone else to step up and take incentive. In this chess game, it was I who ruled the pieces.
And I was fixing to make a move.