01: ALWAYS A SPARTAN

The door opened without a sound, the ever-present soft hiss drowned completely out by the constant thrumming hum of the engines powering through another slipspace theory. That hum would persist until the autopilot found their exit point and tore a hole into realtime to go through, and it was a handy mask for a lot of faint noises.

The cat lay curled in a ball at the forward edge of the middle of the bed, a narrow bunk with a thin, wooden mattress that had learned how to bend despite its nature when pressed upon by the ship's crew. Artemis wasn't under any blankets, which permitted her narrow perch, and she didn't appear to be dozing lightly either.

The woman on the bunk stood an intimidating seven feet nine inches tall when upright, taller than her companion by about three inches. She had honeyed chocolate skin, short jet hair that she was always trying to grow out (but could never seem to get away with it for long) and a long, skinny frame that made her look even taller than she was. Her features were fine-boned, with a delicate brow over almond eyes, a broad, flat nose, high cheekbones, full lips and a small, rounded chin. There was more to her than met the eye, though.

The same could be said for the only other human aboard. Where she was long, lanky and slender, he was stocky, thick, and burled. His arms were bigger around than her thighs, even though her massive height belied her own stout construction. Where she was chocolate, he was a parchment white, where her hair was thick and black as ebon, his buzz-cut was barely visible under direct, bright light – instead, its brilliant golden nature gave his head a soft halo of refracted glow. He had brilliant sky blue eyes, an arched, narrow nose, and square chin. If she were to be called African, he could be called European.

They were children of ONI – the United Nations Space Command's Office of Naval Intelligence – they were Spartan II's, augmented and trained to be weapons of war.

The ship that carried them was a small sloop called Whispers of Fate, but while it could have crewed at a little under a dozen, she, he, and the cat were all that it carried. Many long tales of terror, adventure, endurance and pain had brought them to this moment, the apex of a long, arduous climb out of the war with the since-broken alien Covenant. Events both unlikely and unexpected had guided each to their places, shuffling countless others in the endless game of survival.

Ultimately, that game would not end until it was lost; winning was continuation, never completion. Sprawled on her side on the bed at the back of the small quarter, the sleeping Spartan II looked right at home with her tabby cat. Artemis was a creature that had accompanied her through many bloody conflicts, and still had not run out of lives. If she even had the traditional limit of nine was anyone's guess – there had certainly been more than nine brushes with oblivion!

Flint-093 (or 057, depending on which classified ONI record you were looking at) was technically the only one of the duo with proper military background; Tori-138 had lost her immune system at the conclusion of the ORION project's augmentation process, and had spent the majority of her life locked away in an environmentally sealed asteroid laboratory. Flint had found her in there on one of his worse days, but why she had decided to brave the wild expanse of space at his side was a question he'd never asked.

Rather than tempering his persistently bad luck with moderate fortunes, she had instead joined him in them, and had to fight almost as hard as he to survive what crossed their paths. Tori-138 mystified him; and probably always would. But over the short time she had been following him around the stars, she'd managed to grow on him.

That was likely a good thing, considering the cat was hers, but had adopted him in her stead, and had only begun willingly napping with Tori again after their last big mission together. Flint had been found by his long-searching, long-lost identical twin brother, but the reunion had happened in the middle of a Brute infestation, and the two had needed to take down the Chieftain commanding the Brutes before there was any time to visit.

Two things about Tori worried Flint at the moment; the first and foremost was that his hypermetabolic state produced the antidotal treatment to her fragile condition, but she hadn't been taking her booster shots lately. The second was that she was far too pregnant to wear her Mjolnir anymore.

Flint wasn't very attuned to the finer points of child-bearing, but he was pretty sure she ought to be coming due to spit the thing out sometime soon. On top of this, he'd been running solo mini-ops without her over the last trimester, and each time he suited up and left, he always expected to come back to find it done and overwith, even though it never seemed to happen that way.

He stepped into the room, and almost in tandem, the cat woke up. She extended her forepaws out, and stretched in that contorting way that cats always do, her tiny fangs bared for all the world to see in a jawbreaking yawn. Licking her whiskered lips to finish, Artemis blew a sigh, refolded her front legs, and laid her chin down on them. Her round eyes followed Flint across the room, past the Mjolnir lockers, and the chair that no one ever seemed to sit in.

Whether it was her augmented senses or being disturbed by the cat's moving about next to her, Tori's eyes opened right as Flint stopped moving, a single pace shy of the bed itself. She watched as he reached down and stroked the cat from head to hips, then as the cat tilted her head back and smiled, eyes squinted shut.

Looking up at his face, Tori adopted a partial smirk. "Hello, hero."

He raised a blonde brow. "Is that you telling me to go get myself killed by extraordinary measures?"

The question made her laugh, but she sat up, dropping her legs over the edge of the bed next to Artemis as she did so. Sparing the cat a pet, too, she then cupped her hands under her round belly. "No, that was me being facetious."

"Uh huh." Flint turned around and sat down, opposite the cat from her. Seeing this change in scenery, Artemis stood up, arched her back to stretch, then walked up onto Flint's legs and sat down. He framed her with his hands.

"Going out again?" Tori asked, sensing there was a reason why he'd popped in like this – despite his typical lack of explanation. "What is it this time?"

"You're going to laugh," Flint instructed.

She smiled. "At what?"

He met her gaze. "Innies; can you believe it? After all of this… innies."

Tori did laugh. "Wow, some nerve."

"ONI thinks you're coming along… as usual."

She cast him a look. "You haven't told them yet, have you?"

"Something in my gut keeps telling me I shouldn't tell them… ever." Flint admitted, watching Artemis roll over and squint at him from her upside down position. He stroked her belly once, and she curled up around his hand. He let her latch on with her claws, let her pretend-bite at the webbing between his thumb and index finger, but she wasn't really hurting him any. It was her way of playing around.

Tori breathed a sigh. "To be honest I don't know how they'd take it, either." Odds were fairly good that she knew nothing of Maria, the II who'd retired and had her own family. But Flint did, and he knew that she was closely monitored by ONI's special branch. On occasion, those observing agents would help her out with mundane tasks when her hands got too full, but the thought of having a half a dozen agents aboard the Whispers with them just because Tori had had a baby was a little unnerving.

That and, the both of them were still active-duty, which would complicate such a situation in ONI's eyes. Flint wasn't quite ready to give up the armor. But for so long as ONI didn't know, then ONI couldn't interfere, in whatever manner they deemed appropriate.

"Mission specs don't look that extensive. I shouldn't have too much trouble. Simple in-and-out op. Nothing fancy like what Frank saw us do."

Tori laughed. "Frank saw us get our asses handed to us."

"What, there's only so much heavy artillery that a suit of Mjolnir can take." Flint argued. "And anyway… we still won, and we still came out alive. But this one's not a frontal assault. ONI doesn't want me to flatten the compound."

"You sound almost disappointed." Tori mentioned.

He looked at her, almost forlorn. "Flattening things is a good therapy for stress."

She smiled, and shook her head. "Flint, someday you're just going to have to get a hobby, or something." Without the cat separating them, it was simple enough for her to scoot sideways, and wrap her arms around his broad shoulders. Resting her chin on one of them, she added, "Bring back a souvenir?"

Flint grinned, amused. "Sure."

.

Entering atmosphere worked seamlessly, and there didn't appear to be any prevalent presence of anti-air defenses. Whatever type of insurrectionist base was on the planet below, it must have been the infantry-only kind, or else a well disciplined quiet kind. The Whispers was a fully stealth-enabled sloop, but that didn't qualify it for the kind of cloaking your average Covenant vessel could pull off; look up with naked human eyes, and there she was, big and black and falling through the air.

Pregnant or not, Tori served as a very effective ships' guardian, and the inability to fit into her Mjolnir anymore didn't dampen that at all. She stayed aboard because it minimized the risk of her getting shot at, but if the mission went smoothly at all, the ship would never see any action of any kind, ever. The ship wasn't supposed to participate in the missions anyway, and if Flint didn't screw up so badly as to change that, Tori would never see a single soul.

Disembarkation showcased loudly what kind of landing platform the computer had chosen as viable; the insect population was either oblivious or uncaring of the fact that an enormous metal thing had just whoomphed into the clearing, and were all chirping, twirdling and buzzing in what Flint felt was an unnaturally amplified manner. Adjusting the external audio input on his helmet didn't seem to make much difference in the impression it gave him, either, which he found slightly disturbing.

Having set aground on a fully colonized world – only partially blasted here and there by Covenant ships – but not on any registered ports would have set off all kinds of things; weather sensors, if nothing else. The amount of wind a sloop the size of a small apartment complex could provide to a small patch of forest was enough to strip all the leaves off the trees and severely distress the grass on the ground. Local meteorology meters would go absolutely nuts; either a popcorn storm had blown into being in less than thirty minutes, sprouted a twister that did a lot of foliage rearrangement and no actual damage, then evaporated, or else a ship had landed.

And ships that did such things without port authority's permission or on port authority sanctioned landing pads always got investigated. The upside of this spot was that it would probably take said port authority a little over two and a half days to get anyone out that remote to investigate.

Flint only needed the first 30 hours out of that time window, because a guy who could move at 50 kph using little more than his legs did not need front-door parking at his venue of choice. Needing little more than four hours to get fully in and fully back out both left him plenty of time to execute the mission.

Per ONI's instruction, his actions inside the Innie facilities would go completely unnoticed by things like seismic sensors, satellite observation and city noise ordinances. Ideally, unless someone ran screaming out the front door and into traffic because Flint was in there, the locals wouldn't find out until the smell came wafting out several days later.

Or someone had ordered pizza… which might crimp his schedule somewhat, but getting arrested just wasn't on the to-do list, and never was there born an inner-city law enforcement official willing to try to apply standard cuffs to a really tall dude wearing a half ton of armor. Flint hadn't really interacted much with civilians – of any stripe – in a very long time, not since the Covenant had invaded. This sudden didn't-get-the-memo Innie base popping up some 35 years after the fact felt nothing short of awkward.

Having been to the other side of sanity, and perhaps not all the way back again, Flint had his doubts about this organization being real insurrectionists – they were likely some brand new notion gotten into the heads of some ambitious outer-colony political leadership folks and Earth-central ONI didn't have the patience to deal with them the old fashioned way. So they sent in a hammer of god to smash an anthill, although Flint also got the suspicion that that detail was more because he was nearby when ONI decided the situation warranted smashing, and not necessarily because they specifically wanted a Spartan to do the job.

More to the point, they expected a pair of Spartans to be doing this job, which since there would only be one, might screw up the application of firepower versus targets. And having those thoughts to accompany a guy on a brisk run down to the city to go stir up trouble could never end well…