VIII.
Relk 'Forsovai had never been so proud.
He accepted that he had no part in this war, but inside him there was still the pride of the Elite. The loss of the Long Night of Solace had not been a debilitating setback. He could see that in the ships cruising calmly around Reach, not concerned about picket lines too strictly. That could only mean that there were no free humans left to escape.
This planet would be purified soon. The Covenant devout would no longer have to feel dirty when they looked at it.
There were two people with sufficient rank to undo his exile, neither of whom were likely to be on the ground: the commander of the Fleet of Particular Justice, Thel 'Vadamee; or the Prophet of Inspiration, ensconced on the flagship Truth and Reconciliation. However, he would not be allowed into either of their ships if anyone else in the Sangheili ranks discovered his identity.
Both problems could be solved if he found 'Vadamee on the front lines. A Sangheili leader, especially one with the ferocity and drive of a swordsman, would not be lurking on a ship above his planet. He would want to be down below, throwing splatters of human blood with every swing—
Except that, judging from the state of the planet, there would not be many humans left.
Gor's Seraph could not patch into the military channel that the invasion fleet was using without Relk having to talk to someone in person, but its computer could find hotspots of activity, where the most life signs were gathered. He pulled up a holographic map, yellow lifesigns scattered across it like its population—except the population had gone. The house had been emptied, and the Covenant were moving in. Each yellow life sign was a triumphant warrior, not simply a human inhabitant who had dared to scrape at the dirt of a world that was not theirs.
Areas marked as human cities showed the most Covenant activity, but there was one other spot that seemed anomalous; slightly inland of a cove on the northern hemisphere. Covenant troops were moving there rapidly, and the only other information that the computer could give was that it had been a human starship factory, an installation of their military.
That was the hotbed of activity on Reach right now, and so Relk angled the Seraph for it.
The loss of a world could not set in. Maybe it would, given enough time, and maybe it wouldn't. Maybe it would feel different for a mainline human, and maybe not. And maybe, in this, Spartans were the same as the rest of their breed.
Jorge saw maybes as some distant thing that he didn't need to worry about.
(Except there was that aged feeling again, like maybe he had finally seen too much of this and his bones were aching, serving the same purpose as a warning light on a dashboard.)
He heard a harsh crackle next to his ears as his UNSC comm channels started working again, but there was no one talking; just the white noise of distances too great for signals to travel through. Relk was bringing the Seraph quickly down through the atmosphere, white clouds obscuring the viewports. They dipped down and flew over burnt-brown ground, and Jorge activated Noble Team's personal channel and spoke almost without thinking about it. "This is Noble Five. Who's out there?"
White noise.
Jorge growled, and grabbed a handful of the leathery front seat to pull himself into a better place to see the Elite pilot. "Where are we going?"
No reply except the turning of the Elite's head as it watched the screen. Jorge felt questions waiting in the back of his mind, but they were just that—waiting. He would see to them later. (What happened after the slipstream bomb? Why did the last fleeing ship not leave a distress signal? Where is the rest of Noble Team, or the Spartan Threes stationed at Rally Point Omega? Where's Six?)
The Seraph sloped down and followed the lines of the ground, and Jorge grumbled at Relk's side. "Where are you headed?"
(It would be so easy just to smash the Elite's head in. Kill him now, take control of the ship. They'll all be killed for this. Jorge will have his planet back.)
But a handful of deep breaths later, Jorge saw where Relk was heading. An entire Covenant squad was marching in one determined direction toward a landscape of rippled hills. Two Banshees accompanied a phalanx of foot soldiers of every combatant Covenant species Jorge knew. Relk chattered into his commlink, maybe telling them that he was coming down to say hello.
Jorge tried to track ahead of them with his eyes, obscured as the angle was by the belly of the Seraph beneath him. He looked at the whorls of hills below the horizon, trying to figure out where the squad was headed. Maybe Noble Team had gained a tank and survived, or Halsey had given them some technological secret so that they could keep going in this wasteland…
At first he couldn't see anything in the way of the path the Covenant were scouring. Then he narrowed his eyes and tried to focus on one dot of movement. There were flashes of light as from discharged weapons; what kind or fired by whose hands, he couldn't tell. He tried the comm again. "This is Spartan-052, Noble Five. Who is that down there?"
No response came. The Seraph's wings tipped unexpectedly onto almost a forty-five degree angle as Relk brought them down toward the Covenant line, his growled communications getting increasingly frantic. The ground gained texture and relief.
Jorge craned his neck to try to keep the line of sight he had been working on, and saw a darting figure chased by strings of gold. One Spartan under fire, orange-armored, dodging around rocks and over hills of pebbles. He recognized her from the color immediately. He had been scanning for any of them; gunmetal gray, green, sea-blue, sky-blue, had barely begun to hope that he might best look out for this sunflash orange.
He leaned over the back of the pilot's seat and latched onto Relk's shoulders with crushing force. The Elite jerked back in surprise, yowling at him now instead of at the comm. Jorge was close enough to see the scales at the back of Relk's neck twitch.
The Seraph had been angling right, close enough to the ground now that he could see bushes and individual Covenant faces, and just starting to level out. Jorge bore down on Relk's left shoulder so hard that he felt it scrape in its socket. Relk's jaws snapped.
"That way," Jorge growled, "or I kill you where you sit and let my armor survive the crash."
Relk didn't get it. Jorge lifted his right arm and smacked the side of Relk's head with his gauntlet. The Elite's shoulder went slack as, not knowing what direction he was supposed to be taking, Relk just gave in under the pain. (Jorge thought that this was an instance in which subtle would have worked better, but it was Six down there, and he needed to hurt something before they hurt her.) He kept one eye on the ground, looking for other Spartans. Relk hocked out his approximation of Jorge's name but couldn't manage anything else, and twisted the Seraph's controls back toward the right. The wind was screaming in the wings now and the ground hurtling up too fast. Jorge's ears popped with a sharp rush.
The world jolted. Jorge felt the same MJOLNIR gel that amplified his movements dull his momentum now, providing a giving surface even as his head and shoulders rocked. Brown dirt plumed up to cover the viewports and clattered down like flak, bouncing off the suddenly opaque material. Jorge squeezed his eyes shut and forced them open again. His grip had been dislodged from Relk's shoulders when he curled against the back of the seat almost in a fetal position.
The Elite shook his head, coughing. Alien blood, maybe from Jorge's gauntlet and maybe from the Seraph's console, caked the right side of his face over his eye. He lashed out with his right hand and popped the cockpit seals. Dirt fell inside with a soft shushing sound, and Relk gave a quiet yowl of pain from the back of his throat.
"Move. Move!" Jorge said. The Elite looked back at him and hissed, a full, open-mouthed battle cry of hatred that Jorge had not seen on him since their first meeting.
Maybe Jorge's opinion of the Elite had changed a little bit in their travels together, since he thought "you don't understand" instead of something simply insulting.
Another Elite head, garbed in clean blue-gray armor, appeared outside the viewport just in front of the Seraph's second strut as its hands shoveled away the dirt. Relk pushed up, opening the canopy far enough that he could wriggle through if he really tried. The Elites babbled at each other. Jorge moved, just a tiny shift toward standing up, and the newcomer had a plasma rifle pointed at him so fast that he barely saw it unhook from its wielder's hip.
Luckily, there wasn't much that could be faster than a Spartan.
"Sorry," Jorge muttered, and grabbed the back of Relk's armor with both hands, hooking into a seam and pushing him directly out the half-open canopy into the line of fire. Luckily for all involved, the second Elite did not fire while Relk was in its way.
Relk scrambled out of the way frantically. For a moment it seemed like he was going to just plain run away, his arms pumping and head low. Jorge started climbing out of the Seraph.
The blue-armored Elite shot him in the face.
The plasma splashed across his faceplate. His shield levels plunged into the red, cuing warning beeps. His turret gun was still behind him in the Seraph, and the modifications he'd done to the MJOLNIR to serve as Noble's walking supply cache meant he was without other weapons. (There was room for a knife, but Jorge didn't like knives. People like Emile prefered being close enough to their kills to feel the blade twist; Jorge did not particularly enjoy it.)
But had been chosen to be a Spartan. He had to enjoy the fight a little.
So he punched the Elite in the jaw, scraping across its lip with the metal sealing bars on his gauntlet. His other hand wrapped around its neck as he heaved himself out of the ship. It fired again, and Jorge rolled to the side. The plasma pack burned itself out against the skin of the Seraph, and the Elite's neck didn't quite crack as Jorge wrenched it over him. It was dazed, and lay there twitching its arms until Jorge grabbed the plasma gun from its limp arms and finished the job.
Relk had disappeared. By the time Jorge fished his turret gun out of the wreck of the Seraph, there was a mixed group of Covenant headed for him around the furrows the starship had dug.
He downed the first one with a swing of the turret gun, smacking the butt of it across the Jackal's jaw. On the return swing he hooked his hand around the trigger and fired, counting down with grim certainty as the little ammunition he had left dwindled. Two Jackals and an Elite fell. He looked around, trying to get his bearings. His helmet comm crackled, and he replied almost without thinking. "Hey, Six?"
There was no reply. But she was on his HUD now, a little yellow dot in the top corner of the field. He stepped in that direction and plasma shots peppered the ground around him. He turned and there was Relk, standing on a hillside in front of an Elite with one hand stretched out and a small plasma gun clutched in his three fingers. His other hand was held out straight in front of the Elite next to him; an attempt at an order. Don't shoot. This one is mine.
The other one wasn't having any of that. It shrugged out from behind Relk's arm and fired too. Jorge's shield dipped back into the red.
Noble Six, the woman known for most of her life as Aislinn-B312, didn't have a chance to fire before the Elite swordsman was upon her. The split teardrop-shaped weapon swept up from left to right, humming as it parted the air. The cold afternoon was surprisingly biting against her bare cheeks. Fighting without the MJOLNIR mask dizzied her for a moment as she dodged the first strike, stepping over an ankle-high rock the soft, bubbled tan of concrete—it might once have been part of the MAC emplacement.
The sword sliced past her right side, and she shot the Elite twice in the shoulder with her pistol. The first shot pinged off its armor and left a smoking trail; the second barreled through its wake and was also deflected by the armor, grazing the Elite's shoulder blade. The sword swung back again and Six shifted uphill. Her next shot speared the Elite through the collarbone, and its eyes bugged, but it kept coming. The sword's arc looked too long to dodge. She crouched, ready to feel the sweep of it over her head.
A purple-nosed, smolder-tailed starship flew out of the sky behind the Elite, descending far too rapidly and bleeding far too much smoke to be under control. Its growl filled the air. Six raised her chin; the Elite twitched its head to the side to look around.
In its moment of distraction, Six shot again and got the Elite at center mass. It wavered, but reached out and grabbed a corner of her armor at her collar and pulled as it collapsed.
Six fell on its sword.
She felt the blade cut painlessly hot into her hip and carve like a steak knife. Impact-roar and metal-scream from the other side of the hill told her that the starship had gone with gravity's natural course and crashed. Six jerked away off the energy sword and shot the Elite again in the throat at close range, the flak jumping up and stinging in the cut on her face. Her other hand grabbed the Elite's wrist and forced the sword away from both of their bodies as the alien died, so that when she fell it was harmlessly, and onto the Elite's chest and arm.
It was when she got up, in one adrenaline-fueled push designed to give her a proper field of vision as soon as possible, that the pain started.
Her leg collapsed under her weight, and the jolt started the fierce, angry burn. Six looked down instantly, cupping her thigh guard in her left hand and hefting the pistol in her right.
There was blood sheeting across the thigh guard, and a dark gash stretching from her kidney to the middle of her leg. The pain made her yowl and shake her head, tears threatening her eyes. Either Spartan chemicals or natural propensity erased any thoughts of panic from her mind; she needed to find out what had happened and do something about it, even as the pain was running laps around her ability to rationalize. She pushed it to the side, chasing it with a smaller pain as she bit one canine tooth into the inside of her lip.
Diagnose. Treat. Keep fighting. Find out what that starship crash means for me?
She shifted her hip. It felt like her side was going to rip open, but mobility was intact. The blade had perforated the top half of her thigh and bit into the band of muscle on her side under her ribs, missing any organs by inches. (Probably. She wasn't sure what a sliced kidney would feel like but it might just feel like this.) She screamed through clenched teeth and put all her weight on her left knee, then flipped open a belt pouch for a canister of biofoam.
The spray felt cool and stung, and then all feeling in her hurt leg and side was replaced with the gooseflesh feeling of numbness. She piled more of the foam on, its smell tickling her nose. Other Covenant soldiers moved through the field of boulders toward the crashed spaceship, and Six tracked them with her gaze. None seemed bothered by her presence. I'm walking wounded and there's a variable on the field. They're going to check it out and I should too.
She considered, for just a second, doing the opposite. She could not go back to Sword Base and heal; this was the body she had left. She should run, while the Covenant were distracted, and see if she could find a cave or standing structure.
But the Covenant were everywhere, and running was out of the question.
She grunted as she tried to stand, pushing with that hands and knees as she dragged her wounded leg up and tried to keep it ramrod straight so that the biofoam would harden and she could stop feeling bee stings of pain deeper in her side than could possibly be good. Covenant clustered just over the rise; she could see the bobbing tops of their heads.
Six stumbled her way up the hill.
Relk needed some kind of control. Everything else was so very out of his hands right now, but this demon was his.
At the peak of the hill, he pushed back in front of the Sangheili next to him. "Stop. This one is my hostage."
"This one is the enemy," the soldier said.
And then an armored arm snaked around his neck, the forearm enclosed in a red-orange gauntlet and the fingers splayed. The arm tucked against his neck and pulled, jerking him backwards. Another arm wrapped around from the other side and pushed a knife into his neck just below the jaw. The Sangheili spluttered and collapsed, leaving a bright-colored demon standing beside Relk on the hilltop, the blood-coated knife in its hand.
Jorge looked up from where he had been retreating, armor faintly smoking from three or four plasma burns. Relk scooped up the fallen Elite's plasma rifle and pointed it at the new demon. He hadn't thought there were any more alive on Reach!
The orange demon, medical foam adhered to its left side like a fungal growth, hit him in the hand and drove an elbow into his face. Then it promptly collapsed, stumbling once before its legs gave out and it slid its own body-length down the hill on a fall of dirt and pebbles.
Jorge shot at Relk. Bullets whistled past, and he effected his original plan without even pausing to finish off the second demon; he ran-
straight down the back of the hill, and almost into a tall, blue-gray armored Sangheli. This one didn't budge when Relk tried to keep going past him. Instead, he stepped in front of Relk and stood there like a parent, waiting for his child to give an explanation for all this ridiculous behavior.
Relk said, "Thel'Vadamee?"
The Sangheili said, "Who are you? Were you attached to Truth and Reconciliation?"
Relk thought he might have a chance to lie about his name until a third Sangheili strode up, this one wearing the spindly accouterments of a communications officer and peering at him through a lens of holograms. "Relk'Forsovai," this one said. "Exile."
"I brought you a demon," Relk said. "Right over there. Let me speak to your commander."
"We'll have time for that," said the Sangheili whom Relk was pretty sure was not Thel'Vadamee, due to his rank colors. This was a field commander, part of a squad designed to hold captured ground, not press forward into it. The larger battle was done. "There are two of them, and a lot of us." He tipped his head to the side, quizzically. "And one of you." He turned to the communications officer. "What have you found?"
"That Seraph should have been piloted by a Gor'Ransou out of Helionis. You don't look like a Gor."
"They're escaping!" Relk looked frantically back toward the other side of the hill. His demon, his proof, was over there—
The gray-armored giant grabbed him by the upper arm. "They will be taken care of."
Relk stilled with a sudden realization. They would be. One of the many patrols working this planet over would find them. Relk would get none of the credit.
He struggled, pulling free of the field commander's grip before he stumbled into the communications officer's and started pushing him.
"Get me some Kig-Yar," the field commander said under his breath, and two ran over the crest of the hill, holding their tall, shameful shields in front of them. He gestured, and they surrounded Relk.
If he could just distract them, his demon might get away and Relk could retrieve him later and keep him alive long enough to tell, under torture or whatever was necessary, who exactly had captured him.
Captured was a loose word for it, yes, but the demon didn't speak enough Sangheili to know the difference, and Relk bet that neither the field commander nor any of his cohorts spoke enough Human. All he needed was a nod.
So he fought, banging against the blue shields until one of them turned pink and their ranking officer called in more Sangheili soldiers to escort Relk'Forsovai, deserter and probable murderer of Gor'Ransau, away.
