Back to the past, where everything goes wrong and right at the same time.
Emnett put a bullet in the Dreg's head, and stepped over the falling body. The building was huge, and it had taken them all day to find this room. The rotting tower stood hundreds of feet high, and they had climbed up and down both sides of it, hunting for their quary. His Ghost had detected odd signals and comm interference for the entirety of their search, though they hadn't stopped to investigate it.
And after climbing stairs all day, at an angle, Emnett didn't want anything to do with the signal source that was at least fifty floors above him at the moment. The room they were in was trashed and old, wires and cables scattered and tangled all over the ground from where the Fallen had ripped them out. Everything looked rusted, and a few plants and moss had taken root inside, despite there not being any dirt. The moss squished softly under his boots as he walked in, and there was a few desks and ruined consoles in the room. One console lined one side of the room, a broken chair lay on it's side on the other side of the room in front of a curving, broken, holodesk, which, in it's time, could project images and controls from the projector in it's middle.
"You know, there isn't as much resistance here than I thought there would be." He commented as his Ghost materialized beside him. It was true; there were few Fallen, though most of them, for some odd reason, had King's colors on them.
"The console should be right over here." He Ghost said, floating over to the far end of the room. Their mission was to locate and retrieve a series of files containing research on the darkness that had been done during the Collapse and early Dark Age. Contrary to some beliefs, the Collapse didn't just happen. It occurred over a period of time, about a century, beginning with the arrival of the Fallen and their initial invasion. Then came the Cabal some time after that. As Warmind after Warmind was destroyed, the Vex woke on Venus and Mercury, turning the garden world into a molten war machine before the Traveler stopped them and went silent.
With that act, the Dark Age had begun. As the vex were put to a halt, a cloud had formed beneath the Traveler, and then the orb went silent. But then this cloud began to disperse, and lowered itself to the ground. They were the Ghosts. Hundreds of fairly confused little robots, uncertain of what they were or what they were supposed to do. Then, perhaps, a Ghost had found a body. A corpse. And then, perhaps, they had discovered they could re-animate this corpse.
At some point, the first Guardian had risen, and the Ghosts spread out over the worlds, looking for their own Guardians. But the darkness pressed on, harder than ever with the death of the Traveler, pushing humanity from anywhere and everywhere they had re-claimed since the start of the Collapse, and labs like these, colonies and villages out in remote, hidden places, had been either abandoned or destroyed. Ikora believed that the research within this particular lab could be invaluable.
As his Ghost began scanning, Emnett walked farther into the room, and was startled out of his skin as a Vandal shot out from the doorway off to his side. It loomed up in front of him, and gripped him by the shoulders, snarling madly. He felt a wet spray hit him in the face as he hit the Fallen with the palm of his hand, channeling void light outwards. It let out one more insane gurgle as it flew back and hit the ground.
"You okay?" his Ghost asked, letting out a few clicks and whirls of distress.
Emnett reach up to wipe the wet stuff off his face, only to find that his skin was completely dry. Hmmm. Weird. Maybe I've been on Venus for a little too long then? Or maybe it's the ration packs?
"Yeah, I'm find. Let's get those blueprints and get out of here." He said. "I've had enough of Venus to last me a lifetime."
"Right." His Ghost agreed before turning back to the console. He turned once to look at his Guardian again, but then proceeded with the scanning.
"Take a wild guess at what that fallen did? Yeah, pretty obvious, I know. It just goes to show how utterly stupid humans are."
Back at the Tower, Ikora praised the young man as he presented his prize to the Vanguard.
"I told you he would make it. And you call us nerds, Cayde?" She challenged, holding up the data clip with a triumphant look on her face.
"Yes. Yes I do." The exo replied, looking back down at his map. Emnett let out a violent sneeze, which then turned into a small fit of coughing. Ikora looked at him with a raised eyebrow.
"Try and cover your mouth, will you?" Cayde commented, looking up from his maps. The Warlock grinned sheepishly.
"Cayde, you're an exo." Ikora pointed out with a sigh, pinching the bridge of her nose.
"Sorry. I must have caught something on Venus." Emnett said, shifting his weight. Why did he feel so ache-y all of the sudden? He had felt just fine an hour ago, and had thought the small coughs he kept having were just a result of his body adjusting to the new atmosphere.
"Eh, everyone comes back from Venus with something; Zavala even got chicken pox once." Cayde shrugged, and the Titan vanguard let out a silencing hiss from between his teeth directed at the exo. Cayde cast his fellow vanguard a look, and if exo could make pouty faces, it was for certain that's the face he would be making right now.
"Better go rest up, Guardian. We need you back in the field as soon as possible." Ikora said.
"Yes, ma'am." Emnett nodded. He turned and left the conference room.
"Oh, and Ikora got head lice!" Cayde added, yelling after the Warlock.
As soon as the now-snickering Guardian was gone, both of the other vanguards threw books at the hunter.
"Real mature, guys. Real mature." The exo said, shooting a glare at the awoken.
"Now, If this particular idiot had gone to bed immediately, he wouldn't have been out partying with that Hunter friend of his, and then all our problems might have ended with just that one casualty. Well, and that black vanguard's of course."
"It's so weird how humans have two totally different colors to their skin. That's why I prefer my own people to them; we have all kinds of pigmentations, but those humans… well they are so weird-looking, all of them.Especially the blond ones."
"I'm starting to think she might be blond."
Emnett didn't feel good. He didn't feel good at all. As his feverish mind slowly returned to the waking world, he felt as if his chest was about to explode. Something ripped out of his lungs, bursting out of his mouth.
It felt like his entire body was on fire.
"Oh, no, no, no, no, no! Not good, defiantly not good!" He could barely hear the panicked voice of his Ghost, just now alerted to his Guardian's condition. He peered at the blurry white shape through watering eyes, and shut them tight as his Ghost scanned him with a migraine-inducing burst of blue.
"Turn it off…" he mumbled, his voice catching in his throat, which was so dry he could barely speak, and at first he wondered if he had spoken at all, so stuffy his ears felt. His every heartbeat pounded through his head and rung through his ears as if he were listening to it through a wall of wool. He batted at one of his ears feebly in an attempt to make the pounding stop, to make the sensation of being stabbed through the ears with an arc blade stop, but it was to no avail.
He let out a whining groan that ground in his throat.
"Make it stop…please, just make it stop…make it stop…"
"Hold on, there! I'm going to get Ikora! She'll know what to do!" the voice of his Ghost reassured.
"No…please don't…leave…" he broke off with another explosion of coughing, and the voice of his Ghost no longer cut through the haze. All awareness of his surroundings began to leave him, and he began to once more slip into the grateful darkness of sleep, or unconsciousness.
But fate would not be so kind to him. Every time he lingered on the edge of sweet blackness, where he could hopefully escape the pain by retreating into his dreams, another violent fit of coughing broke loose, and the palpable fantasy of relief would be snatched away from him once more.
When Ikora finally made it to his quarters, it was to find him on the floor by his bed, crouched on all fours with pajamas soaked through with sweat, dry, pink saliva dripping from his mouth onto the floor as he wretched, his empty stomach expelling any of what remained of his dinner from last night.
"Cayde, we got an emergency; it's another one. He's worse than Hill. Tell Terra to prep another bed in the infirmary; he's spitting up blood down here." She ordered over the comms on her Ghost. She crouched down next to Emnett, putting her arms around his violently shaking shoulders as he dry heaved once more.
"We need to be careful; this could be a pandemic, here." Her Ghost said worriedly, watching as her guardian touched the disease-ridden warlock.
"Trust me; I know what I'm doing." The vanguard reassured her partner. The Ghost drooped slightly.
"Alright, then; that's why you're the boss." She sighed. "But, just don't blame me if you end up catching this thing."
"I won't." Ikora nodded. She squeezed Emnett's shoulders. Looking around, she spotted his robes hung up on the wall, and took them, draping them over his shoulders.
"Come, on, let's go. We need to get you down to the infirmary." She urged gently. His Ghost hovered into view from around the corner, and came up to float just in front of his face, clicking and letting out small bleeps of distress.
"Come on; it'll be alright. You're going to be fine. Right?" he looked at Ikora. "He's going to be fine, isn't he?"
"Terra will do her best, and so will I." she reassured the Ghost. She wrapped her arm around Emnett once more, and pulled him to his feet.
She half-dragged, half guided him out of his quarters and down to the infirmary. He looked small and dead next to the shorter woman that was supporting him; a once-great guardian laid low. A hero and a warrior that had survived countless dangers on Venus, only to be like…this on his first full day back on earth after three grueling weeks.
They came into the infirmary, Ikora now staggering under the weight of the other Guardian, whom she was practically carrying now. Cayde was already there, at the bedside of a pale-looking huntress who had collapsed in a fit of violent coughing while delivering a report. He stood up immediately and ran over to Emnett's other side, taking a good deal of his weight off of Ikora.
The Warlock looked up and around himself blearily before his eyes fell on the huntress and went round with shock.
"Arna?" he asked delusionaly. The brown-haired woman lifted her head weakly, and horror exploded onto her face when she saw him. She sat up immediately.
"Emnett? What—" she broke off, coughing. She cleared her throat when it was over. "What happened to you?"
"Same as you, except he's worse; much worse." Ikora answered for him. A green-plated, golden-eyed exo made her way through one of the door, her cloths marking her as one of the medical staff.
"Put him over here." she told the two vanguards, motioning towards a bed not far from Arna Hill's.
She immediately began to work on him, pulling out a device to scan his vitals.
"We need to get him on a lung pump immediately; there's more fluid in there than he can possibly cough up without damaging his lungs permanently." She said seriously after a moment, speaking to one of the ownerless Ghosts that sometimes helped her when they weren't searching the city below for newborn Guardian candidates.
Sure, many Ghosts scoured the world looking for the dead, but the ones who had lost their first Guardians preferred to find living candidates rather than dead ones; children, especially, seemed to give them comfort, as if watching their new Guardian grow up before their eyes made up for the pain of losing their first partner.
"Right." The Ghost said, zooming around to the end of the hall. About a minute later, two more doctors, an awoken and another exo, came rushing around the corner, pushing a large cart in front of them. Hill looked on, eyes wide with terror for her friend, as they prepped him for surgery.
"We need to warn the rest of the tower about this. It could be nothing more than a lung virus, but the last thing we need is for more Guardians to fall ill." Ikora said, Cayde nodded, agreeing.
"I'll get word out to any out-of-city Hunters to steer clear of the Tower until we know what this thing is. In fact, I'll just go ahead and expand the warning to all Guardian channels; I think Zavala's got a strike team or two out on a mission right now." He said, rubbing the back of his head. If exos could look like disheveled, bed-headed, definitely-not-a-morning-person people, then that's what he would definitely look like right now.
"Now, as you can imagine, this did absolutely nothing to stop the disease from spreading-why would it?"
"But as time went on, they eventually managed to work out where the warlock had gotten sick, and after yanking every detail of the mission out of him and his Ghost… well, to give them credit, it didn't take long for them to figure out how he got sick."
"Stupid Fallen."
"Uggh! Forget I said that. Danged Hunter; I'm starting to talk like her. Egth. Gross."
"Anyway, you can guess what happened next; the disease spread to the city, they cut off trade with us and contact with Guardians in the field, blah, blah, blah, let's just skip to my part, shall we?"
"No." Uldren said, glaring at the exo hunter that stood in front of him.
"Yes, that's me; a real leader, unlike that bumbling vanguard I'm talking to right now. I still can't believe he gave me such an idiotic girl for a partner."
"Look, this illness will strike the Reef sooner or later; there's no way our net on the City is perfect. There can-and most likely will-be breaches in the system." Cayde insisted.
Uldren's older sister was nowhere to be found; it was early in the day, and he had learned, long ago at the tender age of five, that Mara was definably not a morning person. A graceful and patient Queen she may appear, but every morning since she was old enough to hate waking up, the inhabitants of the Reef, both awoken and Fallen alike, had learned that Queen turned into a monster for the first hour of being awake.
To make contact with her in any way during this time was a verbal death sentence of public humiliation.
So going into her room and telling her that the Hunter Vanguard of the Last City was here for an audience with her would not only earn him some spit flying into his face, but a ringing sensation in his ears for the rest of the day as well.
"Breaches like you?" Uldren accused. "You may not get sick, exo, but you still spread the disease! You would give us the illness while requesting we help fight it? We, who are otherwise unaffected by this sickness? We don't need to be sent ammunitions by the city; we could leave you in the dust and continue on just fine without you. Why should we involve ourselves with your plague?"
"And if we fall, who will help you push back the Darkness? Don't pretend like the Cabal wouldn't rip your Reef to splinters if we weren't keeping them occupied." Cayde spat. The hunter rarely got nasty, but now was one of the times he was.
"Ha!" Uldren mocked. "You? Keeping the Cabal at bay? You can barely hold on to your own moon, let alone Mars. We all know it's the Vex who are doing all the work."
The exo and the prince were nose-to-nose now, both furious. Two Fallen guards watched nervously, unsure of exactly what to do if a fight broke out. Guardians were extremely dangerous, they knew, but leaving the prince to fend for himself was not an option—not that Prince Uldren couldn't hold his own. They'd seen him fight before, and he was good.
But perhaps not good enough to take on a Guardian as experienced as this one. They clutched their spears nervously.
"Enough!" a tired voice commanded. Both men turned to see the Queen leaning in the entrance to the throne room, looking exhausted and even more pale than usual.
"Mara?" the prince asked, making the Fallen even more nervous. There was a look on his face that they rarely saw, and he only addressed his sister by name when they were alone, or if the situation was dire enough.
And this situation was definitely dire indeed. She was leaning against the doorframe, panting, and the faint stench of sickness that the Guardian had brought with him suddenly became even stronger. The prince rushed forwards as the Queen began to heave, spewing vomit everywhere.
"And this is where it aaaalllll went to heck."
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Yeh. What he said.
Anyway, next chapter we might finally meet Silverhawk... for the second, real time.
Still quite not sure as to why I updated this quickly. Usually I wait about a month or so. I guess I just really need to let my inner comedian out into the interweb as fast as possible.
What do you guys think of the PoV? Do you think I should keep it like this, or make it strictly third person from a specific perspective?
Review Challenge(annoy Uldren): Type in the stupidest battle cry you can think of. The best one will be featured in a near chapter, and I might recycle the rest(cuz I'm gonna need a lot of stupid battle crys as things get rolling quicker). Virtual cookies for the one you think might annoy Uldren the most.
Read and REVEIW my few, cherished readers!
Jayfeatther out.
(P.S. what do you guys think of the cover image? Am I right, or am I right?)
