Boy, this took forever. I spent a lot of time trying to make sure this was as close to canon as I could possibly could, with one notable exception: for the sake of a plot device that will become apparently around the midway point of this oneshot, this is written as if Kat was part of the original Alpha Company of Spartan-IIIs, instead of Beta Company. Aside from that, I'm hoping everything matches up perfectly, so if any of you out there are bigger Halo nerds than me (unlikely at this point, considering how much time I've spent on the Halo Wikia...) and notice a mistake, please point it out in a review. With that said, enjoy.
Spartans never die. They're just missing in action.
It takes a soldier to say it with a straight face. It takes a Spartan to say it with a serious one.
"Noble Leader, seek immediate medical attention."
What was that supposed to mean, anyway? Were Spartans supposed to be immortal? Had ONI let Dr. Halsey take a pair of hedge clippers to all the UNSC red tape and create an army of heroes, an army of fearless, courageous, unthinking and unfeeling and, most importantly, uninhibited warriors? Was the fact that he existed the reason for his existence?
Stupid question. Carter had known the answer for years. And now, it was too late to tell anyone that would understand.
"Noble Leader, please respond."
Maybe he was just thinking too much. They'd told him that a thousand times, hadn't they? What do you mean, 'Why are we taking that cliff?' You're taking that cliff because I'm standing here telling you to take that cliff, Two-Five-Nine. On the battlefield, you won't have time to think. You'll have time for two things: getting the job done, and killing anyone and anything that tries to prevent you from doing so. Have I made myself perfectly clear, Two-Five-Nine?
Yes, sir, you have. I think too much. You think too much. We all think too much, when we should be fighting and killing and cleaning the blood of terrorists and rebels off our boots with nary a dissenting word among us.
He had thought it when his drill sergeant had said all that to him twenty years ago, and now Carter was thinking it again: Maybe we don't think enough.
A barrage of plasma fire impacted against the side of the Pelican, and the sound of sizzling glass and dimpling steel filled the inside of Carter's helmet. He didn't need to look back; he was well aware of the presence of their undesired escorts, a mother Phantom and a pair of Banshees. The Covenant had different names for them, of course, but Carter had never bothered to remember them. If it was purple and it sounded like the dying breath of an unseen specter, it needed to be taken out. Quickly, if at all possible.
And now he was thinking again. Thinking about the two Elites he knew were shunted in behind those elongated insect eyes that served as windshields. He knew they were sentient, but so were all the rebels on the outer colonies. He knew they probably had brothers and families, or something like them, back on whatever planet they came from, but that wasn't enough to make him think twice about ending their lives any way he could. They didn't have clearance for that.
It was enough to make him think once, though. And that was more than he could say for Emile. Or Jun. Or Thom.
Or Kat.
In the troop bay, Emile snapped a round into his grenade launcher. That was Carter's cue to steady the ship as much as he could, though it was really just cordiality to do so. With those Banshees as close as they were, Emile could've hit them with his eyes closed, or at least with the eyeholes filled in on that skull he had painted on his helmet the moment he had gotten it. In full violation of at least half dozen armor maintenance protocols, Doctor Halsey might have added, had she been listening in on Carter's thoughts.
Carter had never been too worried about it. After ten months, it was a shock to even see Emile's chin, let alone his whole face. He liked his privacy. And his grenade launcher. And that was a good thing now, because only a few moments had passed when Carter heard the keen of one of the Banshees—the one on the right, he thought—churn down to a hum. Judging by the sparkling explosion that followed, the disabled Banshee had swerved into its twin and sent them both down in blue-white flames. A grunt of satisfaction crackled in Carter's ear. Targets neutralized.
A wave of heat from the exquisite deaths of the Banshees wafted through the rear vents of Carter's helmet and solidified on his hairline as miniscule beads of sweat. He wasted no time in ripping the helmet off. The state-of-the-art MJOLNIR Mark V armor Noble Team had been given was ten times stronger than the SPI suits the rest of Alpha Company had worn to their graves in PROMOTHEUS, and the shielding tech had saved his life on too many occasions to count, but if it were his choice to make, he would've still taken his old suit any day. At least in those, he could actually breathe properly without feeling like he was drowning in his own skin. Wearing one of the MJOLNIR suits was like wearing two of the fifty-pound packs they'd all carried back in basic training at Onyx. Mendez had told him that Camp Currahee was the closest he'd ever come to hell on earth. That was before the augmentation. That was before an errant plasma bolt had caught Carter with his shields down and left a three-inch wide hole in his stomach that was currently spitting up blood all over the Pelican floor. Don't get blood on the carpet, a tinkling yet powerful voice nagged in Carter's head. I just vacuumed in here.
Carter didn't really have any idea who that voice was. He only heard it when he was distracted or he hadn't gotten enough sleep. He'd heard the voice a lot lately. He'd heard it every day after Thom died.
He liked to imagine it was his mother. He liked to imagine that the augmentation hadn't quite managed to destroy every memory of whoever he had been before '31, before December, before the Christmas that never came and never would again. Was his name even Carter? No. It was something with a B. Just like his home planet. Just like his father.
"Please respond, Sierra Two-Five-Nine. You are alarming me."
Way back in his most distant memories, Carter could remember a time when his every move hadn't been dictated by a preachy, overly matriarchal A.I. He wished desperately for that time now. Still ignoring Auntie Dot for the time being, he glanced back into the troop bay again, trying to get a gauge on how much distance he had on the Phantom tailing them. A bright-red MJORNIR chestpiece blocked his view; Noble Six was standing right behind him, a telltale shimmer dancing around his arms and legs as his shields recharged from the last hit they'd taken.
Noble Six. What a character. What an enigma. As Mendez might have said, what a goddamned godsend. And now that he thought about it, Carter didn't even know his name. He'd seen it in his file when he'd had Kat do a number on the ONI servers a few weeks ago, but he'd been a bit pressed for time and hadn't really even looked at it. Carter had just called him Six ever since he joined Noble Team, and the rouge-armored Spartan hadn't seemed to mind. Probably had bigger things to be upset about. Like how little time this planet had left.
One month. In one month, Reach had fallen with hardly a sound. Thom was dead, Jorge was dead…and Kat. Kat was dead too.
It was a coward's move. Shot in the back of her throat with her shields not even active. The bastards couldn't kill her like men, so they killed her like thieves. Like the animals they were. Before then, Carter had been like Jun; he killed the enemy, but he didn't hate them. He had no reason to. Now, though…Carter couldn't be sure that a fragment of that glimmering pink needle hadn't snuck in between his ribs and lodged behind his lungs, because he felt something explode there every time he replayed that moment in his mind. Kat had fallen, and half her armor had been black. Half her armor had been the same color as that of the previous Noble Six, the first entry on the lengthening list of people he had allowed to die. Everybody and their genetically-enhanced brother told him it wasn't his fault, but he was Noble One and Noble One shouldn't make mistakes like that. Leaders shouldn't be forced to sacrifice their own soldiers. Leaders should be better than that. Stronger than that.
On the other hand, he wasn't completely incompetent. He still had Emile, and perhaps Jun too. And he still had Six.
Noble Six, version 2.0. The kind of Spartan Halsey and Ackerson had been hoping all the Spartan-IIIs would be. Born May 22, 2526, in one of the newer colonies way out on the fringes of ONI-knew-where, he'd been pulled out of Beta Company almost before training had ended. He had over a dozen successful ops under his belt, two or three of which had such high classifications that Carter had never even heard of them. He worked efficiently, he worked ruthlessly, and he worked alone. He always worked alone. Even when he was deployed with a full platoon of soldiers, he would find a way to send them out of danger and take the brunt of each assault himself. The scuffs, scars, and scrapes all across his armor bore testament to that. It was dangerous, it was stupid, it was against every tenet of tactical warfare, but with every mission brief Carter read he became more and more sure that Six was doing it purely to protect the grunts forced to accompany him on his suicide missions. He became completely sure when he tallied up the stats for friendlies killed in action: in fourteen operations, Six had lost only two fellow soldiers. In just as many ops, Carter had lost ten times as many.
He was a Spartan, through and through. A better Spartan than Carter. And Carter respected him because of that. He trusted him for a different reason.
"Not sure how long she's gonna stay together," he shouted back at Six, whose eyes were hidden behind the orange-streaked helmet that he, like Emile, never took off. Recon visor. Not a lot of Spartans got Recon. No Spartan in his right mind wanted Recon. Recon meant being first in line to step up to the frontlines. It meant you weren't expected to come back from the missions you were sent on.
Six always came back. That was probably why they sent him to Noble Team.
"Skies are jammed up anyways," Carter continued. "Gotta get you off her, Lieutenant."
Six protested, like Carter knew he would. "Sir-"
"Don't wanna hear it." Shit, he'd forgotten how much plasma burns hurt. "Get the package to the Autumn."
If he could've seen Six's face, Carter was sure he would've seen a grimace. He hoped he would've seen a grimace. "Done," Six replied after a moment's pause.
"Not yet, it's not..." Carter countered. Six was the most important VIP in the history of this planet with that A.I. on his back. In the whole history of the human race, probably. He would need backup, no matter how much he wouldn't want it. "Emile, go with him. It's a ground game now."
As he had known Six would object to leaving Carter to fend for himself, he also knew now that Emile wouldn't. He was a hundred and fifty percent of the unkillable that ran through Six's veins, but with none of the inspiration found in preserving the lives of the men and women he fought with. He didn't just hate the Covenant; he hated everyone on the other end of his primary weapon of choice, a six-round, pump-action, M45 Tactical Shotgun. Emile didn't fight his enemies; he hunted them. If the situation had been reversed and the Spartans were invading the home worlds of the Covenant, Carter had no doubt in his mind that Emile would be more than willing to kick down the door of a house and slaughter its occupants without a second thought if they were any species other than human. It was that quality that made a great Spartan, an unparalleled warrior, and the kind of person you almost regretted was on your side. At least if he was an enemy, Carter would have no trouble pitying the poor bastards that found themselves with the blade of Emile's kukri in their throats.
Emile stood tall and pumped his fist against his chest, an appropriately brutish show of respect from the bloodthirsty Spartan. "It's been an honor, sir," Emile said, and Carter knew he meant it. As lengthy as their eternal disagreement over how violently the enemy needed to die—Emile's answer was always "very"— had been, Emile had always shown nothing but respect for Carter. And Carter had returned the favor. Personal convictions aside, Emile was a hell of an ally to have, and one you could count on to come back covered in the blood of the Covenant and the spoils of a successful mission.
"Likewise," Carter replied as two new Banshees swooped in to accompany the Phantom behind them. "I'll do what I can to draw their fire," he added with a nod towards the screeching purple machines.
Emile was already poised at the open bay doors waiting to jump by the time Carter finished speaking. Six glanced back at Carter for a moment, and then turned as well. The electric-blue glow strapped to his back gave away the presence of the A.I., their last chance to make this war something they could win instead of something a few of them might survive. And the newest member of Noble Team, the one whom Carter had first met just two days earlier, was the one carrying it. The one who rarely spoke and rarely needed to be spoken. The one who always walked the path he wouldn't allow anyone else to take. The one who was still just as much a mystery to him now as he had been two days ago.
And if you asked Carter about it, there wasn't anyone he'd ever met that was better for the job.
Carter hadn't had any idea what Six would be like when he'd been given the transfer orders. Thom's death had scabbed over by then, but the skin beneath was still raw, and as much as Carter tried not to, he couldn't do anything but wonder how much unlike Thom this new soldier would be. And he had been right to wonder: Six was nothing like Thom in any and all ways. But it hadn't been until New Alexandria that he had realized to what degree.
He certainly matched his classification, if that was any place to start. Hyper-lethal, his file had stated in neat black type, and there really wasn't any other word for him. In two days, it was a rare occasion to hear of Six wasting a bullet with a poor shot. He could use any weapon with efficiency unparalleled even by Jun, and if he ran out of ammo he was more than willing—and more that capable—of using any Covenant weapons he could get his hands on. If it could kill, Six could kill with it. Would kill with it, without complaint. That was what his file had said.
What his file hadn't said was what kind of person would have such a talent in the first place. It didn't say that he would be a quiet and contemplative soldier; not cowardly, but hesitant to speak out of turn. His gleaming armor, scratched and dented though it was, bore the marks of a perfectionist, and that was something Carter could emphasize with. He liked to think that he was one himself.
And then there were the implications. Twelve missions, two friendlies lost. That wasn't skill; that was a dozen separate miracles. But then came New Alexandria. Then came the beginning of the end. Then came Six, dropped from orbit into the middle of the wilderness twenty miles out from the city center, fending off overwhelming Covenant invaders with nothing but what he could scavenge from the corpses of the ones he killed with his bare hands. Carter hadn't been there with him; none of Noble Team had. But he had heard stories from the Army, from the Air Force, even from the ODSTs about a silent Spartan in dented red armor downing entire squads of Brutes with a six-year-old civilian in one hand and a smoking Magnum in the other.
By day's end, a thousand civies owned their lives to Six. And he, of course, had wanted no recognition for it, a fact that wasn't surprising in the least. It was expected that Spartans would serve as faceless warriors, as the expected role models in the white-washed walls of the cities of Reach and the colonies beyond. Gone were the days of admiring cops and firefighters and presidents and humans. If you were a child, you wanted to be a Spartan.
No, you don't, Carter always thought. You little bastards, no, you don't.
Jorge always hated it when Carter had that air about him. That look of thinly veiled disgust at how they were idolized, at how much people took them as the immovable statues they were meant to be. On how irrefutably, irreversibly, unequivocally trapped he was inside that marble suit.
That was why Carter trusted Six. Because he saw the pain in his body language whenever they came across a pile of dead civies covered with plasma burns and solidified Spiker rounds. Because he saw how tightly he had held onto Jorge's dog tags after regrouping with the rest of Noble Team. Because he saw how he kept his helmet on whenever they weren't in combat because he didn't want his face to display the emotions his posture betrayed.
Because somewhere deep beneath that luminescent gold slit on the front of his helmet, Carter knew that Six hated being a Spartan just as much as he did.
"Six." The Spartan turned back to face his commander. "That A.I. chose you," Carter continued. "She made the right choice."
For a moment, Six stared back. Carter could only assume he wasn't blinking. And for that moment, he felt something that he could only call brotherhood between them. Something with an air of physicality, an air of finality about it. Both of them would be gone soon, wouldn't they? The whole planet would be. That was what Halsey had predicted. And for all her narcissism and all her emotional detachment from the world around her, there was one thing Dr. Catherine Halsey never was, and that was wrong.
Funny. She probably would've made a better Spartan than him.
Now Six was nodding again. One quick bob of his head, one flash of dying sunlight across his visor, and then he was crouched by the back hatch of the troop bay in tandem with Emile, the A.I. module gripped in his hand and a DMR strapped to his back.
Go time.
"Om my mark!" Carter shouted over the sputtering engines of the Pelican. He held up three fingers, each clad in their own sheaf of powder-blue titanium exoskeleton.
Three.
Goodbye, Emile.
Two.
Goodbye, Six.
One.
And God help all of us strong, unbeatable, unbearable bastards.
"Mark!"
The Pelican leapt upwards as the weight of two of its three occupants lifted away, and by the time it had settled again, Carter was alone in the cockpit. And the future of the human race was tumbling down into one of the thousand canyons they'd flown over in the last two hours. Carter knew that he had done the right thing. Six and that A.I. were Priority One…probably above it, now that he thought about it.
That didn't make the realization that he was officially expendable now any more pleasant. Then again, he'd always been expendable. Every Spartan was, to a certain extent. Being pulled out of Operation: PROMOTHEUS had just pushed his own personal expiration date back a few years.
The comm unit in the helmet lying on the floor beside Carter clicked to life, and Emile's voice wafted out of it. "Still with us, Commander?" he said, sounding slightly out of breath but otherwise unharmed.
Carter grabbed his helmet and brought the bottom rim close enough to his mouth to respond. "Stay low, let me draw the heat," he said, pushing the Pelican into a slight dive. You just deliver that package." He didn't wait for a reply before tossing the helmet away again. He knew he wouldn't get one. Orders weren't usually something that needed to be confirmed in Noble Team.
God help you, Carter thought once again. He didn't really know why he thought about God as someone who would've cared about a couple of Spartans on Reach. Religion was another one of those things they didn't have clearance for. But what Carter wasn't allowed to see, he could remember. Remember a little farmhouse on the outskirts of Biko with a rough-skinned man and a cream-white woman and a brown-haired, sunburnt, uncontainable little boy inside. Remember the infant sister, born in the spring when the trees swirled with yellow dust and wildflowers fell from the moons. Remember the woman, his mother, kneeling before a tiny wooden man hanging from a cross with her eyes closed and her head bowed, and her lips whispering that the Lord was her shepherd, she would overcome.
Sometimes, he wondered whether she had cried when his clone had died. The only reason he could keep his jaw firm and his resolve steady right now was because he was sure that she had. Because he was sure that he had once been human himself.
Because he was sure that she would've cried for Kat. And Jorge. And Thom.
"There's our destination, Six. Pillar of Autumn." Emile had forgotten to switch off of the public channel again. This time, Carter was somewhat thankful he had. "Race you to her."
It was stupid, really, feeling guilty for not mourning them. Thom and Jorge had gone out in exactly the way every Spartan hoped their death would be: for the sake of the mission, and the glory of heroic sacrifice. They wouldn't have mourned him if he had been the one to carry up the warhead or set off the slipspace rupture. Kat wouldn't have mourned him if it had been his throat the needle had exploded in.
Or would she have?
She didn't seem like the type who would devote much time to reminiscing. When he'd first met her, she'd been a head shorter than Carter and had sheared her hair down almost to her skull even before they made all the girls do the same. Two hundred pounds of warrior in a fifty-pound bag, Mendez had called her. He had always liked Kat. Carter had always hated him.
The first time they'd met, his introduction had left him with a bruise on his back and a red line of barely unbroken skin where Kat had knocked him to the ground and trapped his windpipe beneath the unsharpened side of a three-inch kitchen knife. God only knew where she'd gotten a knife; given how smart she was, he'd always assumed she had just somehow smuggled it past the security officers who had stripped them down and searched them before they were allowed to enter the compound. She hadn't come away scot-free, of course; her feminine countenance made irrelevant in the heat of the moment, she had a black eye and the wind knocked out of her before Mendez and a few soldiers with assault rifles had pulled them apart. After that, they were always together, initially because Mendez forced them to share everything ration and every weapon they were given to try and break their newfound rivalry before it truly began. For about a month, they had a single bed. After a week of them both sleeping on the ground to avoid giving the other the satisfaction of seeing them weak enough to take the bed, Mendez relented slightly and ordered an extra bunk.
For five years, every day was a silent competition, each look one of unreasoned avarice. Each bolstered by the idea of beating the other in war and in peace, they quickly rose to the top of each combat report, and they quickly each gained a small following within the confines of the camp. In every battle, you were either on Carter's Blue Team, or Kat's Red Team. Mendez let it happen, something that confused Carter more and more every time the corporal looked in dead in the eyes and then looked away again. In the back of his mind, Carter knew that ONI wouldn't have approved of their Spartan-III program consisting of two warring factions, but at the time he would've take on the whole Covenant army he had read about in a few communications he wasn't supposed to see before he gave himself up to Kat.
And then there was Operation: SMOKESCREEN. It was a training exercise, but one that was set up like a full deployment into enemy territory. The area they had to work with was a hundred squares miles and filled with all kinds of weapons with live ammunition, although this ammo would only send an electric shock through the specially designed battle armor they all had to wear and knock them out if they were hit enough. Three hundred Spartan-III's versus three thousand UNSC Army personnel. It was the largest and most realistic combat exercise ever assembled, and Carter had no doubt in his mind that his crew would emerge victorious.
Which was why when Mendez put Carter and Kat at the head of the same platoon and replied to any and all complaints and transfer requests with "Tough shit, sunshine," Carter was just about ready to pick the lock of their toon's holding room and take a Pelican straight back to Biko. But he didn't. Partially because he knew he had nothing left to return to, partially because he knew that ONI would hunt him down probably before he even left the planet's orbit, but mostly because that would mean a victory for Kat, and a loss for him. And as much as he began to despise his role as a Spartan later on in life, Carter never could and never would tolerate failure, especially on his own part.
For a half-hour, everything went fine. They took their first objective with zero deaths and only one casualty, with Kat and Carter splitting time at the top of the confirmed kill list they were all keeping track of in their heads. For a half-hour, the two of them remained, if not friendly, at least cordial. But all it took was one slip-up, one disagreement about the best approach to take for the second objective. Kat grabbed his rifle, Carter pushed her away, and in the next instant half their squad was gone.
Grenade launchers, Carter later remembered thinking as he tried to shout over the thumping clods of dirt. We've never even seen grenade launchers in combat before.
Well, they were seeing them then, and after a ten-minute bombardment the clearing they'd stopped in was littered with the limp bodies of their entire platoon. As far as Carter could tell, he was the last one left "alive". That was the only time he could remember ever wishing for a helmet; at the time, all he wanted was something to hide his fury at himself.
A few minutes after the pack of soldiers dispersed, Carter slid out from underneath the patch of ferns he'd taken cover under. Across the clearing, he saw another figure stand as well, their armor identical to his save for the red insignia of a cougar on the right corner of the chestplate. Kat.
No one else stirred. They were alone, and they had no one to blame but themselves.
It was at that moment that they ceased to be enemies. Because it was at that moment that Carter saw the same shame-filled rage smoldering on Kat's face as he felt on his own, and that Kat came to the same realization about him. And so they made a pact, quickly spoken and quickly silenced: for the time being, they would work as equals. The fact that this agreement certainly wouldn't end after the conclusion of the exercise was one of the many things that went unsaid.
With his prejudice gone, Carter found that Kat was a better ally than ten of the other Spartan-III's put together. Both of them were equally skilled with a rifle, and Kat had the bonus trait of being able to wrap nearly any piece of tech she could find around her finger. It was this trait that they used to their advantage: after tracking a pair of sentries back to the compound where the battle suits of both sides of the exercise were tracked and monitored, they fought their way into the control room for the exercise in fifteen minutes flat. Once they were in, Kat managed to send out a pulse that short-circuited all of the suits designated for the attacking Army soldiers and knocked them all down like tenpins. The exercise was ended fifteen seconds later.
Carter had never seen Mendez as angry as he was when he and Kat were brought in for debriefing. Losing their entire platoon while they were arguing with each other was one thing; disrupting the corporal's training exercise was something that seemed to be almost beyond his comprehension. After fifteen minutes of spittle-spraying and increasingly creative combinations of swear words, Mendez sent them back to the barracks and, as they left the debriefing room, growled for someone to make sure the control room was absolutely impenetrable next time.
As it turned out, there had only been one more next time, with nearly five thousand enemy soldiers with far superior weapons. That time, it only took them eleven-and-a-half minutes to get into the control room. And that time, Mendez didn't so much as bat an eyelid. A lesser mind would've thought the corporal had just been better prepared for defeat that time. Carter knew he had just fallen right into Mendez's plan.
But still, it worked. Carter and Kat jointly achieved victory in every exercise after that, even after their augmentation into true machinations of destruction. Throughout everything, they remained somewhere between friends and partners, family and associates. There had never been any declaration of their bond from anyone, let alone Carter. Let alone Kat. There was implicit trust to get the job done, and that was that.
But there was a different trust too. The kind Carter felt with Six. Trust that begged to be explicit, that was far beyond something as simple as life and death. Give them a bit more time, and Carter and Six could've been brothers, if not in blood at least bathed in it. And as for Kat…
As for Kat…
"Scarab! Do not engage! Gun it, Six!"
Carter jumped, and the Pelican jumped with him. He hadn't even realized Emile had stayed on the open channel. He'd probably been talking ever since his last check-in.
Pushing his thoughts away from the grinding of his shattered ribs, Carter reached out and grabbed hold of his helmet again. He'd need it on if Emile expected assistance, which of course, he did. He wouldn't have left on the open channel if he hadn't. Leave it to Emile to just expect help to arrive rather than ask for it.
And leave it to me to provide it for him, he thought as he crested over a hill and found himself flying over not just one, but two of the four-legged behemoths some highly optimistic commanding officer had christened "Scarabs". He'd heard stories of a Spartan-II who had taken one of these Covie-sponsored clusterfucks out of commission in one of the smaller skirmishes in the Outer Colonies, but he had never heard anything to substantiate that as anything more than a legend penned by blind hope. He also hadn't heard anything about that Spartan-II surviving the attempt. Both of those inconsistencies were very good reasons for him to be nothing more than a nuisance to the colossal war machines, or at least more of one than the heavily laden Mongoose, no bigger than a Moa egg from this height, carrying two soldiers in thick, somewhat misshapen combat armor. The red one, the driver, had a glowing blue spot on his back. Carter would've have considered it quite a lucky break to have been so close to the other two Spartans, if he had believed in the concept anymore. If he had believed in it ever.
So what was this now? Another fly in the ointment, that's what. And he just so happened to be holding the only pair of tweezers around.
A burst of 70mm machine gun fire from the Pelican's front turret got the first Scarab's attention. Like poking a bear with a stick, Carter thought grimly. He was gone before this bear could turn itself around quick enough to poke back, though. He didn't hear any screams of agony through his headset, so he figured that meant he had done his job. Six and Emile were probably long gone by now. Off came the helmet again. Not only for the purposes of personal comfort this time: there was too much blood on the visor to see clearly by now. He heard one last shout from the mike—he thought it was Emile…something about a jump?—and then the cockpit was empty again. As far as he was concerned, it was radio silence from here on out.
Carter harbored no delusions about his own invincibility. He would be dead before day's end, he was sure of that; it was why he had allowed himself as much freedom with his thoughts as he had in the last few minutes. It was invigorating, after a lifetime of thick black tape and little white lies. He would've liked to share it with some of the boys back at ONI. He would've liked to spit in their eyes.
No. Maybe not. Kat would've hated that. And he cared about that. For some reason, he had always tried to keep Kat happy. Why would he do that? Was that what all commanders did? No. If it was his duty as a leader, he would have tried to make all of Noble Team happy. But it was just Kat. Always what she was to him.
He got a brief visual of Six's Mongoose again just before it ramped off one of the twisted struts of a shattered bridge and crashed to a halt on the other side. He put on his helmet just long enough to tip them off about the Brute squads and Wraith team blocking the path forward, and kept it on just long enough to hear Emile confirm the transmission.
What was she to him? He'd never really thought about it before. Never needed to before SMOKESCREEN, never wanted to until New Alexandria, never had the time to until now. It'd be tragic, if those thoughts were supposed to exist at all. Because they weren't, really. Human emotion was one of those things the technicians had prided themselves on breeding out of their super-soldiers. A warrior unhindered by, what did Halsey call it…"petty morality"? Now, that was an asset. That was a god. Now we are become death, defenders of worlds. Ironic? Hypocritical? Of course. You can't save the human race without taking away the humanity of their saviors. It's unfortunate. It's necessary. It's logical.
No one else ever thought that was funny. Maybe it wasn't supposed to be.
There were times he supposed that his rebellious tendencies made him a failure. Made him weak. No, he always told himself, I'm not a failure. I got through training. I became a Spartan. Failures can't become Spartans.
So he wasn't a failure. Just a liability. Well, he could live with that. Not for very much longer, but he could die comfortable with the fact that, hey, guess what, you ONI spooks, you heartless little bastards, you spent years scrubbing all the earth and sweat and stains of creed off your child soldiers, and you missed a spot. Right here, about eight inches above that ragged crimson hole in Alpha-Two-Five-Nine's torso. You didn't get there fast enough. And now what? What do we have here? Oh, Jesus Christ in heaven, a Spartan with a conscience. A Spartan who doesn't want to admit that he's lost count of the number of lives he's taken. A Spartan who actually gives credence to the number of lives he's taken. A Spartan who wakes up in a cold sweat every other night because of that Grunt's mask he ripped off and that Jackal's shield he punched through and that Elite's throat he slit open and that mother's heart he put a stake through twenty-one years ago. A Spartan who, God help us all, has times where he wishes he knew how to pray, so he could pray for everyone killed in this war, humans and aliens alike. But that wouldn't even work, would it? In a war spawned by the fanatical religion of the invading aliens, who would he even pray to? What god would want His followers to do such a thing? What god would listen to someone who had partaken in such slaughter, whose entire life continued to be for the express purpose of violating the only Commandment Carter could ever remember from his reading: Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not willingly take the life of another sentient being. Thou shalt not murder.
Thou shalt not be a murderer of thyself.
That was why he hated being a Spartan. Sooner or later, all the murdering catches up with you, and you start making mistakes. You start blaming yourself for deaths that weren't your fault, because you can't help but be convinced that there was some way that you could have prevented that death from occurring if you'd only been quick enough, smart enough, strong enough. And you can't do that. You can't think about things like that, because that's what happens to every Spartan who thinks too much. They go "missing in action". They never die.
Well, how about that. All this time wasted thinking, and Carter had just now realized that all he had ever wanted, from the moment he stepped onto the hard-packed sand of Camp Currahee, was to die.
Well…not just die, he supposed. It would have been child's play to take one wrong step in battle, one intentionally shifted shot. He wasn't suicidal, just…complacent. About being a Spartan. About Reach. About Kat and Thom and Jorge and probably Jun by now. And soon, Emile and Six.
No. Don't think like that. They're more important than you, Carter. More important than three hundred Spartans wasted in PROMETHEUS and TORPEDO. Why do you think that A.I. chose Six and not you? Luck of the draw? Improbable. There was a reason; the inexplicable little brains-in-a-box always had their reasons. Halsey had her reasons. ONI had their reasons.
And Carter? A pawn, perhaps a knight at best. No reason here; just directives. That was another thing Carter had just now realized: he couldn't remember the last time he had made a true decision for himself. Those dedicated to keeping himself and his team alive in combat hardly counted; what about when to load out, what area to prioritize, what kind of personal life he was allowed to have? And more importantly, was that ONI's fault for never unlocking his cage, or his own for never having the courage to break through the bars?
Well, it would've been a first if he had. No Spartan had ever gone rogue in the history of the program. Or what if they had? How many of those Spartans designated "MIA" on the active roster truly were just missing in action?
Carter hacked up the biggest gob of blood yet, sending a spasm pricking down his arms and across his lower back. If he was going to escape, the time was now.
If he was going to escape. Time. Right now. Oh, God, he was really considering it, wasn't he? Deciding on it. Turning the Pelican. Pointing it towards the dying sun setting over the dying planet that would be the last thing he ever saw.
Six.
Carter wrenched the stick back to the left and pulled the Pelican into a tight curve, the G's nearly ripping the spindly craft apart. What the hell was he thinking? See, this is why they don't want you thinking, Carter. You get your head all caught up in what your life would be like if you were just a normal little real boy, and you forget that you're a goddamn Spartan and you'd best get comfortable with that, sweetcheeks.
Well, all right, then. No more thinking. Hold this piece of junk together as long as possible and provide support for Noble Five and Noble Six by any and all means necessary and proper. If any synapses are firing behind those genetically-augmented blue eyes after that, more power to you. You're a Spartan. Don't you ever forget it.
Christ, his head hurt. Maybe he could just…
The air in front of the Pelican shimmered, and Carter swerved half a second soon enough. As the Pelican creaked, the clouds crackled, and a cylindrical chasm opened behind him. A Covenant cruiser emerged from Slipspace, a dark teardrop-shaped object dripping off its belly. The teardrop detached the instant cruiser had decelerated to a normal pace, four identical arms unfolding from it as it fell. Another Scarab, he thought. The size of the angry red blip on the motion tracker set into the dashboard of the Pelican agreed.
This was not good. Neither was the fact that only about a half-inch of screen space separated that angry red blip from the two faint yellow ones that marked the position of the remainder of Noble Team.
The Scarab hit the ground hard, its spindly legs punching through ten feet of bedrock and what used to be a metal-domed farmhouse. According to the motion tracker, Emile and Six were hardly a hundred meters away from it. If they broke cover at the wrong moment, they'd be luminescent grit within seconds. Judging by the size of the open clearing that seemed to be the only passable route forward, there were a lot of wrong moments to be had.
For the final time, Carter put on his helmet. "Noble! You got a…situation," he said, the last word taking the place of a variety of expletives he would have rather used.
Emile wasn't nearly as controlled. "Mother…" he muttered into his end of the connection before he regained his trademark bravado. "We can get past it, sir!"
"No, you can't," Carter retorted. And you know it. "Not without help."
"Commander, you don't have the firepower!" Emile shouted just before the Scarab turned and faced the cavern where he and Six were holed up. The Scarab began to charge its main weapon, but a quick barrage of machine gun fire from the Pelican was enough to distract it. But not damage it. Emile was right; he didn't have the firepower to take this thing, and neither did they. It would take a miracle to get the A.I. through this.
A miracle. They'd need a miracle.
They'd need a martyr.
It was hard to say exactly why Carter's thought took the path they did in that moment. Whether it was an overbearing sense of priority or simply a much stronger urge to rid himself of this mortal plane than he had previously thought possessed him, he knew exactly what he was going to do. But why…that was the bigger question. It always had been.
"I've got the mass," he finally said, in a tone that he knew would make it absolutely clear that this was not a statement that would be argued with. And yet, he was still hoping they would. Hoping one of them in particular would.
Emile was quick to conceal his emotions—that, or he didn't have any to begin with. "Solid copy," he replied. "Hit 'em hard, boss."
And there it was. Not Emile's last words; what had come after them. A tiny click, not even noticeable unless you were hinging every iota of your very existence on hearing it, coming out of the earpiece in his helmet. A tiny light, too: the one on the side of the HUD in his visor signifying that the little click had come from the comm unit of Noble Six. He had been so close to speaking up, and Carter knew exactly what he would've said: Don't do this, Commander. You don't have to do this, Commander. Carter.
Then again, maybe it meant nothing. But as long as Carter could imagine that there was someone out there who would see his death as something more than a noble sacrifice, and as long as Carter could imagine that that someone was Six…then he could die. Little solace though it should have been, it was the best feeling he could remember ever having. The feeling that someone understood him like a brother. Understood him as a brother. And now that he thought about it, he was fairly sure Kat would've done the same thing, would've pressed the button to start arguing back, and then backed down and kept her lips sealed. He was all right with that. That was to be expected. But there was still the click. There was still the meaning behind it.
He pulled the Pelican hard around to the left. The Scarab had surely spotted him by now, but it was too late for either machine to change course. They were going to crash into each other, and neither one of them would make it out alive. And even aside from the sense of calm Six's attempt to speak up, there was something almost…normal about it. Well, of course there is, he thought a moment later. It's what I've been doing for my entire life.
"You're on your own, Noble…" he muttered into his headset, though loud enough to ensure that his teammates heard it. There were only two people he was doing this for; one was dead, and the other was probably soon to be so. But if he could convince himself, delude himself into thinking they were both watching right now, so much the better. He didn't have any aspirations about going to heaven, just about having a life that meant something. And that A.I. sure as hell meant something. It meant freedom, it meant courage, it meant hope, and all of that was clipped onto Six's back. All of that was what he and Kat and Thom and Jorge and, yes, even Jun and Emile had been fighting for. And if that was all their lives were meant for…well, that was good enough for him.
This was the second-to-last thought to pass through Carter-A259's mind. The final thought was much shorter, only a single sentence. No regrets, no flashes of all the life he missed, no misgivings. Just one single thought that he was too late in realizing was all he had ever wished for. Just one. Only one.
I'm going home, Kat. I'm going home.
"…Carter out."
For any of my consistent readers who are reading this, I have not given up on any of my stories. To say I've been pressed for time lately is an understatement, but rest assured I'm doing everything I can to try and grind out my next chapters...because quite frankly, I hate it when it takes me this long to finish updates just as much as you all do. Probably more, actually. So, thank you for your continued patience, and I'll hopefully be returning soon with the final chapter of "The Shadow" and then an update for "Growing Down". This took priority for a while, but now it's done and I'm ready to get back to business as much as I can. Until next time...