Body and Soul
"Do you believe in a soul?"
"What?"
"It's a human thing, isn't it? A soul? The idea of some kind of non-physical substance that inhabits us? That goes somewhere after you die?"
"You should ask Magus. He's the religious guy."
"And you didn't answer my question."
Hal sighed and popped another round into the skull of the dead Fallen at his feet for the hell of it. Apocalypses had a funny way of working, he reflected. Not only had humanity been nearly made extinct by the Darkness, but the entire process had decided to screw over the human gene pool as well through the creation of the Awoken. The universe's little joke, as if to say "hey, you wanted elves? Well you've got elves. Who've conveniently forgotten everything about their forefathers. Irony!"
"Hal?"
And the Exos, he also recalled, what with the erasure of their memories. Luckily he didn't have to deal with an Exo on his team. Only an Awoken.
"Hal, are you listening?"
Then again, the Titan reasoned, maybe an Exo wouldn't be so bad an idea. Least Exos knew who created them. They didn't have to worry about religious mumbo jumbo.
"Hal!"
But he did. Or at least he did because Artemis did, the team's Hunter who slapped his helmet to get his attention.
"What?!" he exclaimed.
"We were talking about souls," she said, putting her hands on her hips. "You didn't answer me."
"Want an answer?" he asked.
She nodded.
"Don't know. Don't care."
She opened her mouth.
"And before you start talking about machine gods and Fallen souls, I still don't care."
The mouth closed.
It wasn't entirely true, Hal reflected, even as he moved to another Fallen corpse to see if there was any glimmer he could salvage. Fireteam Jackal had cleared out the Devils' Lair – Fallen with delusions of grandeur (like all Fallen really) who served the Machine God – a miserable little construct named Sepiks Prime who had the sole function of absorbing the aliens' souls, or whatever the hell they were. It was…well, unnerving, he silently admitted Not so much in the spiritual sense (not that he had a personal sense of any such thing), but rather the notion of something within the Fallen being absorbed for what he assumed was a purpose. Presumably the aliens were fine with that deal. Just like they were fine working with the Hive rather than shooting at them. So with alliances on one hand, and fanaticism on the other…he gave the corpse a kick after finding no glimmer. Suddenly things were a whole lot more complicated.
"Hal, you there?" crackled a voice.
"Team Leader here," he answered into his radio. "Team Leader, not Hal. How many times do I have to say that?"
"As many as you like," Magus answered. "Until the Traveller Himself speaks, and-"
"Yeah yeah, Traveller speaks, day of sunshine, blah blah blah," the Titan murmured. "Is there anything else? Or can we head back to our ships?"
"I called to say that I'm already there. And await my friends' return."
Groovy Magus, hug a rainbow. "Right. Ships. We'll be there. Team Leader out."
The Titan shut the radio down. Magus was a Warlock. Warlocks did their own thing. Like Awoken. Such as kneeling down in front of so-called machine gods.
Bollocks.
Bollocks. Balls. What Artemis lacked physically, what Magus lacked emotionally, and what the Fallen…he didn't know. Nor did he care to find out. But he did care enough to walk over to the team's Hunter.
"Magus called," he said. "We're leaving."
"It's funny, isn't it?" the Awoken asked, running her palm over the machine's body. "Those…things, we see coming out of the Fallen each time we kill them." She ran the palm over her armour, some alien blood smearing on her lavender skin. She looked up at Hal. "See this too."
"Artemis-"
"I mean, if souls exist, and go somewhere…do you think Fallen souls go somewhere? I mean, if they went in here, and we destroyed it, did we destroy them as well? Or did we free them?"
"I don't give a Traveller's arse where they went, we're leaving!" Hal snapped. He grabbed the Awoken's shoulder, dragging her to her feet.
"That easy huh?" she asked. "Just, kill? And when it goes beyond that, it's still as easy?"
"I'm a Guardian. It's my job." Behind his visor, the Titan's eyes narrowed. "Your job too."
"Aren't we meant to learn about our enemy?" Artemis asked. "Isn't that part of the job too?"
"The moment Fallen souls, or whatever the hell they are, impact my ability to kill them, yeah, it becomes relevant," Hal said. "Till then, I don't care. You have a right to care. Just like how it's my prerogative to tell you what to do, and when to do it. Like moving." He gestured to the exit out of the room. "Now."
"Right," the Awoken said softly. "Of course."
She began walking. Hal watched her exit the core area, not willing to risk Artemis staying behind. Not out of fear for her, but for the fear of wasting even more time. Once she was out of sight, he began walking as well. Yet glanced back. At the machine. At the bodies of the Fallen. At the skulls of humans mounted on spears that surrounded it. That had dotted the route they'd taken to put the so-called House of Devils out of commission.
Gods. Souls. Seven centuries after an apocalypse, thousands of years of recorded human history, millions of years of evolution, and it still came down to the age old questions. Gods. Souls. Afterlives. Aliens.
Well, we got that answer at least.
Maybe Artemis had a point, he reflected. At the least, the powers that be in the Tower would want to know about what they discovered. The notion that maybe the wispy light that emitted from the body of every Fallen had some kind of rationale behind it. That maybe they were, for a lack of a better, souls. And went somewhere. And for all he knew, consumed.
Shrugging, the Titan began walking. Past the bodies of the Fallen. Killed.
He didn't kick any of them. It didn't come off as satisfying right now for some reason.