Chapter 2

Foster's action journal

Alpha Tantari system, Tribute, Trinity Holy Catholic Church in Kilk city, 2510, January 2nd, 0200 hours

Michael sat on the bench facing the alter adorned with candelabras of gold with glowing candles, making facets of the shining statue of the holly son glitter. A high roof soared to meat the heavens, and a thousand organ pipes walled the mass area from the inner chapel. He stared down on Foster today with cold judgment, not with mercy or pity for his loss.

Tears leaked from the corners of his eyes, but his face was perfectly set. His muscles strained against the black suit he hadn't worn in years, and his aviator-style glasses hung from a breast pocket.

The funeral was over, but Michael had to live with the fact that he would be the next to sacrifice himself for the ideals of the Lord. He was fully willing, but he did not think he could inflict so much pain on his family, knowing what he had been through. Nothing would be the same again.

He heard a cracking sound, and saw that he was crushing the seat in front of him with his clenched hand and quickly stopped.

A priest immerged from behind the great wall of the organ, and stepped down from the chapel, looking down on Foster's kneeling from.

"You look as a spectre, my child. Your heart is troubled."

Foster looked up with shadowed eyes. "All due respect, father. Cut the Bullshit. What do you want?"

Father Antoine exhaled slowly and looked a little more solemnly down on Michael. He knew he wouldn't stand for anything other than the truth, but he didn't fear Foster. The two of them went way back.

"I understand you loved him like a brother," he said, and Foster trembled anew. "But life goes on. It could have been you. It could have been Bradly. You must understand this. You put yourself into God's hands when you joined the United Nations Space Command. Christopher's destiny was to die in combat, a glorious death indeed. I understand that he fought gallantly and to the last." He put a hand on Foster's now quaking shoulder, bobbing with fresh sobs. "He is where death cannot reach him now, a place where he will take refuge from war. You must envy Chris, but not follow him. Remember his name, fight in his name if you must. His death was not for nothing, Michael."

"Wasn't it?" Foster looked away from Father Antoine. Unable to look the sympathetic priest in the eye, or regard Jesus in his judgemental demeanour, he simply put his forehead on the seat in front of him. "He fell. I couldn't do anything. I failed him. We have a saying that Kirkwood always used to preach to us; lives wasted, or lives spent?"

Antoine sighed in exasperation. "You are focussing on the negative, Michael. His was spent. He died so that another could survive. Destiny rarely calls us to duty at a moment of our choosing, but Chris had that luxury. He turned and fought, instead of running from the inevitable. Don't run, Michael."

With that, Father Antoine touched Foster's head, and turned to re-enter the chapel.

Lilly, his wife, was there to greet him when he came to the house an hour later, parking his Volkswagen Prospector in the asphalt drive. She was pretty, as always, but a tad scruffy, as she had been preparing dinner and keeping their ten-year-old son in line while he played in the back yard.

Their house was situated right in the middle of Tribute's only area that could really be called a rural establishment. Their neighbours were a mile down the dirt road, and farm land stretched to the horizons in great rows. JUTON combines roved on automated paths harvesting the crop of the season.

"Michael, I thought you needed some time, so I went ahead with Mitch and made supper." She whipped flour off her hands on her apron and approached him. "I hope you don't mind."

Michael shook his head, leaned forward and kissed Lilly once, then looked past her to see Mitch making theatrical retching noises and retreating into the kitchen.

He smiled at the familiar sight and turned back to Lilly. "It's good to be home."

As soon as he entered the house, Mitch tackled him in the waste, and he recoiled with generous exaggeration, then ruffled his hair and plunked himself down at their old scrubbed kitchen table.

He was amazed when he was able to tell Mitch off for flexing his biceps at the dinner table and sternly advise him to eat his salad. It was all so mundane, so regular. He remembered that Mitch had school the next day, and that he and Lilly would have the entire house to themselves, and that Patrick and the guys from the shipyard would be at the pub in the evening after a hard day`s labour. He knew that he would be called to his irksome duties on their vast farm by his wife, but neglect them in favour of frolicking and having wheat-throwing fights. He was home.

When they had finished dinner, they all retired to bed. Foster watched through the doorway of Mitch's room as Lilly sang him his favourite lullaby, Stars and the Moon, as she pulled the covers up to his chin. He watched his eyes flutter closed as the song reached its conclusion, and a serene expression settle his soft features.

He lay in bed that night facing Lilly, not dreaming of war.

The morning came slowly. His eyes opened onto the image of bright sunlight, and it blinded him more and more as the fog of sleep cleared. The first sleep that had not been cryogenically induced in two years, and nothing compared to it. Birds chirped instead of the blowing of Kirkwood's favourite horn.

He did not want to think of Kirkwood now.

Michael turned to Lilly and touched the hand that rested on his chest. She shifted, but did not move otherwise. He was stuck, then.

He smiled, and kissed her.

"Michael," she spoke softly into his ear. "What happened to us? When you joined the Defence Forces, and we said goodbye. Did you lose faith?"

He turned his head to face her fully in the eyes. "Nothing happened. I asked you to take care of Mitchell, I asked you to put your world on hold, and promised to come back. I went to fight."

"Fight the ones who killed your parents?" she asked beseechingly. "You didn't just go to get away, Michael?"

Foster looked at her, lost for words. "I'm here, Lilly. It was for you, my family, and all I had left that I went. I believed that we could go on forever in happiness, but my call to duty was stronger than my selfish impulse." He wiped away a single tear with his hardened thumb, and purred into her ear. "You and Mitch are more important to me than anything that could possibly come between us. I will never leave you, but I had to fight for you."

She pushed her arms around his head and hugged him tightly, and he responded in kind, bracingly and without fear. "I'll wait for you, Michael, I promise. Whatever you need to do, you go and do it, just come back alive."

"Last night of stress leave, Barty."

His mug of beer fizzed under his nose and sent a sharp impulse to yawn and sneeze at the same time through his nervous system. The normal hours of sleep left him more disoriented than refreshed, thus his recent habit of nodding into his drink.

"Damn. And I thought I had problems with the new JUTON model. You're shipping out?"

The man beside him on the long, gleaming bar was a plump and podgy but genial original Russian come to harvest the cheap land of wild Tribute, and had been his most trusted friend before the surge of terrorism in 2499.

"My friend, you are one unlucky bastard, is what you are."

"Thanks a load, mate," Foster chuckled into his beer. "That makes me feel much better."

"You know what his war needs?" the overbearing Russian suggested in his thick accent, slamming his hand alarmingly on the metal bar as he did so. "Spartans."

Michael turned his dozing head lazily to scrutinize the man curiously for the first time that night. "What?"

"Spartans," he said again. As if it was obvious what he meant. "Don't tell me you've never heard… well, they were a group of three-hundred soldiers who were said to be unbeatable. They defended their home city of Sparta with world-renowned bravery and strength and earned the title of fiercest warriors ever to live." He looked around at the others around at the others seated around the bar. "No? We need some heroes to really win, to make the Insurrection fear us."

Foster snorted and drank deeply. "How do we do that? Spartans were trained in the ancient ways of combat from the age of six. All that the UNSC needs is people to pull the trigger and kill the bad guy with pieces of flying metal. What could be simpler?"

Bartrolavitch sat back contemplatively, then replied, "Of course, my mistake. And who can point the gun better than Michael Foster, Kilk Tribute's finest?"

All raised their mugs with a roar of manly agreement, and Foster raised his own modestly.

"I think I'll go back to the old homestead," Foster said to Bartrolavitch, then got up and exited the building onto the long street outside. It had been raining since he had arrived at the small Cantina an hour before, and darkness had cropped up from the opposite horizon. The edge of Kilk City was nothing special, 50-story high-rises giving way to sprawling wear-houses housing grain and corn. At this time of year, transport trucks filled underground motorways leading to the city's space elevator.

Few walked the alleyways at this time of night, apart from the odd couple or staggering drunk. He was affectively alone.

He strolled down the street, hands deep in his pockets, and whistling a merry farming tune that he had heard on the colonial broadcast channel that day in the barn. So much was new on this world that he felt newly born.

Michael rounded the corner, then stopped suddenly mid step, placing his foot silently on the rainy pavement and feeling cold metal at his side.

"Hey!"

For a heart-stopping moment, he turned and saw a hulking form running down the street, but then Bartrolavitch's waddling frame came scampering around the bend with his wallet in hand. "You left this."

Foster sighed and accepted the leather object graciously. "You gave me a start, Barty," he remarked, catching his breath and barely hiding the M6 in the sleeve of his coat.

"'s okay," the Russian said in a slurred voice. "The old gait is alarming sometimes."

With that, the man hiccupped once, turned, and started his long, hobbling journey back to the bar, and hopefully, Foster thought privately, a taxi.

"Good night my friend," was his last word before staggering around the corner, but his boisterously wide frame did not mask the covert shape of a man, perfectly stationary, his back to an old chain link gate.