[Edited April 9 2012: edited typos and revised the ending. My bad for posting at 1 am last night without proofreading the last part and missing out stuff. So it was heavily edited. Also edited December 9.] Exams put me on a short hiatus. But now I'm back to writing. I think we are almost into enemy territory, so... Duck! Shats are gonna' start hittin' the fan! (Oh, and bad marine language in here, so mind your head!) Oh yeah, and Skyrim. Muhh. [ This foreword was written nearly 5 months ago... Well, time does fly. Hope all this research and getting facts straight, fitting it all together like a jigsaw was worth it.] [ And this was written a month ago. Well, at least I said what I wanted to here. This is long enough to be two oneshots anyway. So no apologies.]
Chapter 7 (Flash forward)
0250 Hours, November 18, 2552 (Military Calendar)
Sol System. Voi, Kenya. Above The Artifact.
/Comlog start;
Personal id(42GF3A);/
/cmd80/
[Start transcript]
"Damn, they got a fetish for glassing our planets or what? Up our very last one. Just look."
"This is bullshit. We gonna die in this fuckin' phantom. Elites are gonna sticking us from our behinds. Then stick us again to kill us twice. I bet my ass on that."
"No kiddin'."
"Shut your trap or they really are going to. Especially when they hear the amount of crap you're capable of babbling."
"Then why the fuck are they glassing Earth right in front of our eyes? Might as well have left us down there as well. Hell might be a better place than here."
"Hell is if they do not glass the planet, Marine. Ever encountered those things before?"
"Not at all ma'am. You'd better enlighten me."
"It's worse than you getting your hairy ass chewed off piece by piece by jackals. Worse than that thick skull of yours being drilled to nothing, hole by hole, by Section 3."
"No shit."
"Just talking about it makes me want to hurl. Only I emptied my sodden gut hours before on someone else. Something. Infected. We had to incinerating them. Shoot them and they come back. Just uglier. Fuck that. Ten of us gone before we could close the doors. We watched them go. It was horrible to watch."
"Dammit. Enough to make the CO crack. Damn, you guys hear? This flood bitch is the real deal."
"Shut up Mike. Just shut the hell up."
"Where's all that ODST bravado gone, huh tuxman?"
"Up your arse. It gets worse."
"Yeah right. Nothing gets worse than this. Nothing, man, nothing."
"zz- Elites and -zz- agreed to form an allia- -zzzzz- -ships and personn- -zzz- -easefire as of -zz- military time."
"Hell, ma'am, that supposed to be music?"
"To your puny soul. Can it and listen to the radio."
"-all remaining ground personnel to repor- -zz- -ard- -zzz- -Dawn. I repeat, all -zzzz-"
"Elites and humans? Like those funky bastards- well shit."
"Seems like we're shifting course. Seems like we're going back after all."
"I'd face an Elite any day, just don't give me paperwork."
"You're not even worth the paperwork."
"Give me a- holy mother of-"
"Gotta give 'em credit for that. Guess trying to make us shit our pants is an intrinsic alien value."
"But, seems like we're home, wherever that is."
"Hell we are, goddamn. I need some fuckin' sleep."
"You'll get it when you're dead, Marine. Now move out!"
/cmd70/
/Comlog end;/
Parisa bailed out last in line behind her marines. She saluted an Elite pilot who was watching, but he made no response. The phantom picked itself up with a small bow and hummed its way across to the other side of the cavernous Covenant hangar bay.
Fuckin' Elites. The phrase made sense yesterday, and it did today. A mere holo of one of their hulking kind was more than enough to make her trigger finger twitch.
In the dim hangar bay, she was slow to recognise the bulk in front of her. She needed the whispers of her marines who had started to crowd together to provoke her imagination into seeing the outlines of a UNSC ship. It was a frigate with its name printed on its hull: Forward Unto Dawn.
Parisa's instinct told her not to linger on the surface of a Covenant ship, so she formed up her remaining company of a hundred and two to march into the frigate's hangar. No guards were waiting for them at the airlock. Not a surprise, though. Protocol had but all been lost in the past few weeks. As the human fleet was gradually broken apart and laid waste to, it made less and less sense to stick to tradition when there were so few people left to follow it. Parisa could count (even name) all the remaining human warships by her fingers, and it was not difficult to map out all ground units that were left. Of all the ground forces deployed from the African base, only her company remained fully functional, but that status, Parisa knew, was a threadbare definition that hid how much of a skeleton her company was. She herself was ready to collapse any time soon too. What saved her company was dastardly luck. Mozambique was far South and the Covenant had just started pouring in when the flood hit. They were at the best place at the best time to escape massacre. 'Best' in this case was relative. Their situation was bad enough, just not as glorious a shit-hole as other places. That had saved her company's collective ass. The Home Fleet's attached brigade 'worked' too, but it was spread so thin across the world they could only serve as preliminary damage report. The Army now largely served as support for Fleet forces after being hit again and again in Africa, losing two thirds of their men there. Another lucky "battalion" to generally survive the onslaught unscathed was Flight Ops, but they were already so few to begin with in the first place that they did not really count.
For the rest who were not so lucky... She had heard reports of ODSTs being wiped out by the hundreds as they dropped, and camps being bombarded by Brute cannons and reduced to just barely enough men to fill a platoon. The marines who were now bustling around the Forward Unto Dawn were either those with working BASE Comms, or were those fortunate enough to hitch a ride up into space on a Pelican, much like herself. The rest still down there on the African continent were probably already lost to plasma or flood.
She pushed through a crowd of marines with a violet trim on their chest plates in a corridor as she looked for accommodations with some of her marines. Violet... That was the famous trim that ground forces attached to Core World defence wore. The best the marine corps has to offer. Earthies. She gave them a pass; it was usually more difficult talking to Earthies if you were an off-world marine. Arrogant bastards much like Elites, except you understood very well why they were such huge ass holes, which only made you hate them even more.
"Move it, move it!" Parisa intoned to her weary marines who had put down their sacks to take a break from all the heavy lifting. No, she did not want Earthies to remember her unit as weak, even though it probably would not matter in a few days, after everyone was blown to pieces by one thing or another. But it mattered to her now.
A few Earthies turned to her. Tall and muscular, all at least a head and an extra boot sole taller than her. HQ battalion, she footed guessed. Toughest marines out of a 50,000 strong Core World Force. Damned bad luck if one were to ever pick a fight with them. Any one of them could easily be a mixed martial artist champ or a heavyweight title holder. Both, if you had your lucky horseshoe.
"Hey, here's a cutie," one of them slurred from beside the door by which Parisa had just entered.
She resisted the impulse to turn and give them a staring down, not wanting to be baited, and quickened her pace with her marines in tow.
"Hey, lemme see your face for a bit." Parisa was jerked backwards with a crude pull, and she almost fell. A twenty kilo pack was not the easiest of things to carry when combat fatigue set in.
She was spun around to face a dozen crude faces, each weathered down so much that you would not tell the difference between a rock and them even if you put them side by side.
"Damn killjoy. Lieutenant. First." The one who spoke raised an eyebrow and cocked a jeering smile at Parisa. He towered over her, blotting out the deck lights.
His gaze hovered on her insignia, before it travelled to her face and stopped there. Parisa held the gaze for a long time.
He turned his face up at Parisa's troops.
"Mind if we borrow your girl for a while, boys? Share some of your fun?"
"You don't talk to my CO like that, dirtman."
A few of her marines had crowded behind Parisa.
"Aww, come on. You kids have had her long enough." Parisa watched as the Earthies sneered collectively. She was watching the situation turn from bad to worse. Fuck. I should have seen this coming. Rank is as useful as a cheesestick nowadays.
"Must I keep you boys under a leash at all times?" Parisa bellowed at her own marines, but the message was meant for the Earthies as well.
Neither side made a move; but the air hardened. It had become almost dense enough to float in despite the artificial gravity. Both sides were almost face to face. Cocked chins and clenched fists were about to clash, and Parisa had lost control. Dammit. Gotta wish I were a Spartan sometimes. She made her last bet to cool the situation. She sucked in cold recycled air and projected her voice.
"Marines, stand dow-" She never had the chance to finish the command. She was tugged behind her marines' line, and the brawl began. She was little use in hand-to-hand combat. She was too light to throw a good punch, and skill did not really matter no matter what drill instructors said. You only needed size and reflex. She had the latter, but she could not say the same for size. She dodged as someone lunged at her, tried for a quick chop to the neck, but the muscle was rock solid. She doubted she did much to the soldier.
It was a free for all. One on either side would be pressed to a bulkhead and whacked hard if he wasn't quick enough to kick the other back. Sometimes fights were internal, what with marines setting scores straight and playing up old grudges. There were no spectators.
The clipped sound of heavy boots permeated the corridor, punching through the raucous free-for-all. An armoured giant turned the corner. Few brawlers heard the Spartan coming, but the glint of the golden visor and two meters of leaf green ceramic armour was enough to raise any soldier's head. The sight of the opalescent green giant was enough to stop most marines in their tracks. Everyone on deck stood to attention out of reflex. Even those who were folded on the floor struggled to straighten up.
The Spartans commanded respect, I'd give you that. She herself seemed to straighten somewhat as he passed the saluting marines.
She had seen a Spartan on Earth before. Once, briefly, near a sandy beach while the fight was in New Mombasa. He gave her the same impression as one did months ago. A natural soldier. Fierce warriors to be recorded down in myths and legends. Not that he wasn't already legendary.
His boots made a muffled thumping sound, very unlike marine boots, which had a succinct "thuk-thuk-thuk" bite of sole on metal. His wide gait and off-pitch boots would have been instinctively recognized as 'Elite' on any ship, Parisa realised.
He stopped in front of Parisa, last in line.
"Any difficulties, Lieutenant Hanabusa?" the Spartan asked. It was hard to tell what rank he was. Parisa spotted a small black tag that read S-117. Sierra 117. The same one as before.
He spun around to face the thirty odd marines lined up against the two sides of the wall, and growled, "Dismissed." The metallic voice than emanated from his helmet was more than enough incentive for the marines to obey.
They departed in a line, taking whatever they had together with them.
Parisa let out a trickle of a withdrawn breath and gratefully leaned back against the wall. She felt the stickiness of half-dried blood in her hair as it contacted the bulkhead.
"I owe you another, Chief," she smiled lopsidedly at the visored helmet, unsure of how she should react to the Chief's intervention. She did not know if he even remembered who she was, or about the time she had saved the men in her sector. Did he read off my name tag? But that was too quick; he spoke before he turned to me. But Spartans are really fast, aren't they? He probably did turn under the helmet. The suits must have electronic tagging. That's must have been how he knew my surname.
The Master Chief's initials have been marked down at least once a day in fleet-wide reports since the war dropped in on Earth. His presence, and even lack thereof in the later parts of the month caused such big disturbances that half the fleet and ground forces' officers knew where he was at any given time. Saving a few marines is probably what he does for his morning warm-up.
He was bent down so low, so close her that she was breathing right onto his visor. A thin layer of mist formed for a microsecond before fading. Her palms were moist under her gloves, and her knees were buckling under the intense gaze that she felt. Seems like the old guys were right. Maybe you could feel someone taking aim at you. She imagined an x-ray passing right through her flesh and through her ribs, heart and lungs, spine, and out from her posterior armour plate. She felt it deep in her bones.
Yet she felt a warm comfort too, something like what a parent would give. What she felt... was it concern? Maybe Spartans were less machine than she thought they were. Or, more likely than not, her judgement on human feelings were so skewered after endless nights hugging her rifle to sleep that anyone who looked at her for more than a second was a potential lover, parent or friend. Still, the Spartan was more human than the Corps gave him credit for. I am currently so qualified to say that.
There was no wind in the ship, only recycled air leaking from vents on the side of corridors. It was not right, Parisa thought, not being able to have gusts of wind blow gently onto our faces. We humans are too used to being on hard ground. She said it with pride as a soldier, not disdain. She also thought how lucky humanity was to have the Master Chief.
And so he left without another word. Parisa wanted to say something, anything, but her tongue seemed tied down, and nothing came out. His towering back, as he slowly walked away, seemed too imposing to call out to as well.
And what would the use of that be? What I really need now is rest.
The news was out. The good news: they had five hours of easy rest without Brutes ships hammering the fleet left, right and centre. The bad news was more chummy. After that five, they would be out in the fields again, betting all their lives on a single chance: that humanity could still fight what was coming, be it flood or covenant. The Forward Unto Dawn and the Aegis were to travel through the portal to where the fight was to be, and her company was going in with the ships.
Actually, news could not go much worse than this. More news was good news in the theatre of war. There was nothing much left to report in terms of bad news, anyway. News that still came meant that someone was still in control, that you weren't the last officer in the fleet. That was the intended effect. And it worked perfectly.
Parisa managed a full two hours' sleep in her cot before a vile, spitting Brute tormented her awake. She gave the cot to an ODST who was lying on the floor, stark naked except for a pair of thermal underwear, eyelids fluttering in the boreal air. An achievement, as there was no heating in the hangar bays-turned-campsite. She wore full fatigues plus a vest and she still felt the chill biting at her ankles. Some bravado men show even in desperate times. She threw her blanket on the man.
"No sick leave today, marine," she grunted.
The man saluted while still stuck flat to the floor.
"Yes Ma'am!" he barked back, before hurriedly hopping into the cot, a rare commodity on the ship. The hangar bay had less than ten. Some were moved down from their rooms by technicians for themselves, others moved down by marines for their COs.
She palmed her Tacpad. Mail and memos were so flying around, but they now came in trickles, usually never more than three at a time. The senders were also becoming less and less varied. Relevant paperwork was now in a past age. She could now recognize all the names the mails were being sent out to. Not all of the names she saw still had an owner. Neither did the yet-to-be-recommissioned AIs that now crowded the nets. All of them VIP evacuees on ONI stealth ships that were rumoured to house black-ops Spartans.
Parisa actually felt sorry for them. Especially the world AIs; the smart ones. If you'd ever talked to one, they could talk with such blistering emotion that you were left thinking why weren't they the leaders of humanity when what we got were drab politicians in grey suits. Callista, Eridanus II's resident smarty, was always over-exerting herself. Military commanders got live updates twenty-four seven, until one commander told her to shut the fuck up. She flared from red to green above the holo projector, and argued that if commanders did not get the updates, then nobody would. She would get herself involved in all sorts of going-ons, like helping fix a stack error in prefab farms, down all the way to ploughing a field when an operator was sick. Parisa remembered when Callista had popped up in her home network to tip her off on a General's unannounced visit to promote her to a company CO.
Callista was one of the few AIs who had resisted ONI attempts to extract her from her planet. Her emotional logic had swamped her objective logic, turning her rampant, so it was reported. She was glassed along with the planet she loved.
Almost every remaining ship now stored an on-board AI, though most were preserved in stasis. Most frigates could not handle smart AIs for extended periods of time, especially not when fuel was limited. AIs gulped down huge amounts of energy; just to run them at full iteration for an hour could cost an entire capital city's daily consumption for a week. Only a few were still up and about now, but when a battle started once again they would be reactivated.
Parisa reached the canteen. Lights dimmed, it was chock full of marines – many snoozing on tables, chairs and some on the floor. No one paid her any attention. And she did well not to pay them any attention as well. The grime and stink, if she thought about it, would put her off food for days.
The counter was unmanned, so she vaulted over to get herself something. Nothing in the trays either. The kitchen was her last bet on this ship then.
Bright florescent lights flooded every inch of table, cupboard and freezer in this sparkle-clean territory of the cooks. Parisa ran a hand over the nearest counter. As smooth as the last Stratovarious she played, borrowed from a marine lucky enough to have one. Everything was white in the kitchen, just like the cooks' uniform and the coffee they produced. Possibly the cleanest part of the ship, and only because there would always be someone to blame for an expeditious spread of stomach aches otherwise.
There was nothing that did not need to be cooked in the freeze – except for a hoard of ice-cream in little cubic containers, each meticulously sorted out row by row into their flavours and stocked so that every last flavour row had one more container than the others to the left of it. How the chefs did it was a mystery, but even to the trespasser, it was beautiful to see order manifested in neat rows once in a while.
She slipped a hand through the retainer field and plucked out a container from the freezer's cold yet protective embrace. A film of water droplets formed on the plastic shell which harboured the cream-coloured delicacy inside.
Parisa always had had a soft spot for ice-cream. Then again, surely nothing could be better than a cup of cloud-white heaven before the derelict vessel she was on board headed for total annihilation. Her superiors wouldn't hear about her stealing ice-cream, of course. For the most part, they were all dead.
In any case, ice-cream remained ice-cream, and it was still heaven no matter where it was to be had. Her first love was ice-cream. But it was her dear John that she had shared it first with. Heaven wasn't the same without him.
It was that delicious little knack for confectionery that John had that made him seem less callous to Parisa than he did to the rest of the school who only saw a bully growing in him. John was devilishly good at making things work for him, and just like how he could pull gravballs down full court, his desserts were always 'full court'.
Oh yes, I had almost forgotten how much I loved food. Probably what got me mixed up with these warmongering mutts anyway.
She dug out a small trench in the vanilla ice-cream and put the spoonful onto her palate. No, not even the Admiral's ship's chefs could make the same miracle that Parisa experienced – what, thirty six years ago?
"Space travel. Makes you feel so much older than you really are," Parisa grumbled at the ice-cream. She was barely thirty five in real time, what with cryo and slipspace being her temporary coffin after Eridanus. Sure, the ice-cream was great, but it lacked a personal touch. Sentimentality, Parisa. Or was it nostalgia? There would be time to mull this out later. Given there was one.
She retreated from the freeze and plunked her aching behind onto a counter. Her feet could not reach the floor. Being short was one thing. Think Napoleon. Looking like a fresh OCS graduate and being short was much, much worse. Not so long ago on her last R&R back on some edge world the fleet stopped by for repairs a few years back, local infantry were still trying to pick her up, only to be dismayed by her officer's tattoo. Her small size, granted to her by her mainly Asian descent, did help her in the squeeze-and-wiggle obstacle courses though. Most marines who were larger had to take more strenuous routes, and thus were more prone to injury. Not that Parisa hadn't had her fair share, easy tight-space courses not withstanding. In field obstacle courses she died. Sometime nearly literally, when the sergeants hit her with tranquillizer pellets which knocked her out for a beat, and leaving her to wake up in pain on whatever she collapsed on. She usually had to pull a few accumulated favours from the large guys to settle her on grass and not mud or stones, which would be always be sticky or scorching no matter which course she woke up from. Luckily men liked it cute.
That was the first tried confession, being cute. Wasn't her fault, not for her lack of trying to be otherwise. She had tried different things, like tying it up, gelling her hair into a square, even shaving (her head hair). But there was always something that someone liked with a petite body, it seemed. And it annoyed the hell out of Parisa. Of course, her being top in tactical did much not to help.
The second confession. In a sky full of guys, Parisa oft wondered why she had never had a proper sexual encounter before. Was she hiding behind a cloud of memories and dreams? Or why in the sea of men she was left stranded in her own kingdom by the sea, not by any fault of her own, again? Or maybe it was her own, just that she never could reconcile the fact with the nameless narrator of his story centuries back. Probably she just never tried. Poe himself would not be able to give himself a proper answer, nor for her.
It did not feel like she had been imprisoned by her experience. Instead it was more of a loss of heart. Content to wallow in the past, she never could bring herself to love as she loved John again. Another loss, another disappearance, would tear out her heart and rip her soul into two. It already did once. But that had become a secondary pain in a few years. What hurt her, increasingly so, was her fading memories of John. I'm just like an old woman living the last of her years after all her family has died. What the hell am I living for anyway? Forgotten as well. Dementia has sure hit me early.
Regret, regret, regret. She would give all she could offer to have a moment with John again.
Parisa finished off the last of her ice-cream, scraping the corners perfectly clean with the square edge of her plastic spoon. Maybe the chefs aren't to blame. The texture and taste were perfectly balanced. The only problem was that the ice-cream reeked of fabricated milk compounds. The dry after 'taste' of the milk compounds were starting to set in. She wished she were back on Eridanus. Not the time for this, Parisa! was what she would have thought, had it been a scant month earlier. In recent weeks she had come to terms with her dreams of the sunny days of Eridanus, the iridescent Lake Gusev. Lake Gusev. The one and only.
But it was no more, living only in Parisa's dreams, a fairy tale that choose the wrong owner. Gone, Parisa breathed as she peered into the depths of the ice-cream container. She put the spoon back into the container and flicked it into a nearby recycle bin. She reached down her vest for an amulet, one from an ancient, long-forgotten memory. It was a coin, nickel, of the old millennia. It was half a coin, to be precise. The actual coin had been divided into two, one face shorn off the other. She had the heads, which she rubbed with a thumb, feeling its uneven bumps caress her battle-worn fingers. She could hardly feel it under her calluses. The tails part was artificial; John's handiwork. You would never tell the difference until you held the amulet. Warm from Parisa's chest on the metallic side and unassumingly cool to the touch on the plasti-alloy side. Where was the tails half? Parisa had never seen John wear his half after that incident.
Not that she saw him much after that, anyway. He fell so sick soon afterwards. Nothing could save him – the 'disease' was genetic, they said (who cares who 'they' were?) and that it had no cure. To hell with doctors and their shams and shamelessness, and their potty magic that they advertised, "Could save anyone, if you had the heart". They needed more heart, the prigs. Doctors were such hypocrites, really. Pay to cure a sickness, was it? They wouldn't give a damn if you were cured or not, or even sick in the first place. They only cared about the money. Parisa was starting to think military medics were the best doctors around They were the real doctors. The ones that patched you up no matter the pain or work. Fixed pay, plus medals if they saved a whole bunch of people, marines, civvies or otherwise. Their job was just to save, and money wasn't included in the equation.
The tiny medallion of John's was like his heart, trapped in a mean, lean body, but full of meaning. They first called him 'the Bull' at first for his athleticism. It turned into 'bully' as people saw him winning all the games and competitions they threw at him, not just physical ones at that. Teachers banned him for the official games, saying with a kindly look, "John, give others a chance." For recess games, children ousted him, or made him referee all the time, else they would not play. So John fit into the crevice that the school had so well engineered for him, while he kept his silence and peace. At least as much as the other children let him keep.
Didn't I tell myself to lay off on the past? Parisa needed a break urgently. She did not know if she would survive the next drop onto the Halo. And here she was going over her childhood in infinite loops.
"Lieutenant Hanabusa."
Her TACPAD made her jump. In a pristine kitchen, on board a military frigate housed in a huge, protecting Covenant carrier, things could still scare you.
"Report to the armoury to be briefed on weapon load-out and strategy immediately. AI generated notes included."
Paris's eyes skimmed to the kitchen entrance. Nobody. She gently plied open the fridge door and secured three more cubes of ice cream. They would keep cold for at least a couple of hours in their insulating warped polymer cases.
Hopefully shipboard ice-cream would not be the last thing she eats.
"Did someone forget the lights?" Parisa asked as she entered the armoury. The long room was pitch black, and the only light came from the opened door. Crates were stacked along the walls, going from small arms to rocket launchers. She could make out a few silhouettes against the wall at the far end.
"No, but you arrived at the correct time."
The lights snapped on in a flash.
"Awww, shit!" someone cried out.
Parisa could see a tight group of marines and officers huddled around a pile of non-standard-looking scopes on the counter.
"And that's the bad news. You can't switch from unlit environments to lit environments. It will blind you. You would have to give these new scopes time to switch. About two seconds. It's a change in material physics, so the scientists tell me, so don't try to improve it with the sticks and stones you find on this ship; it will probably just break."
Parisa had joined the group now, and she could see that the scopes weren't standard UNSC ordinance. Aside from standard UNSC catches, they also had Covenant weapon attachment hooks that would fit them onto carbines and beam rifles.
Parisa realised the person speaking was Admiral Hood. Surprised to see the Admiral in person, Parisa took a second to stand to. The Admiral gave a warm nod and said, "Well, Lieutenant, try it for yourself. You choose whether or not to give it to your men."
The Admiral saluted to the group, turning to everyone in turn and gave each person a fortifying stare in the eye. Parisa could not help but stand straighter as he passed.
As the Admiral passed, she could distinctly tell the lines and creases that seemed carved into Admiral Hood's face. Each wrinkle he had only seemed to increase his prestige around anyone, especially in his white admiral's uniform.
The moment passed, and the awe died down into simple gratefulness for having such a man on the right side. Moral support is real then. The room was abuzz again.
"Damn, the Admiral has a way with briefings. Not even four minutes."
"Discounting how he suddenly switched on the lights."
Parisa was tossed a scope by a sergeant.
"Try it out, ma'am."
It had a flexiform outer material, designed to wrap around any equipment. Another quip from the Science division. Parisa looked through. Everything looked more contrasted, and the usually blinding strip of light installed in the frigate were less glaring. It felt as if someone had splashed real colours onto the world. She looked at the sergeant. FOF tag glowing green. The tag on the table flashed red. Amazing technology cooked up by the tech division again. The FOF tagging was brilliantly executed and implemented on this scope.
"Highly addictive," she concluded as she handed the scope back to the sergeant.
"Well, ma'am, if you like it enough, we have plenty to pass around to your boys."
Parisa mulled over the idea of unpredictable scopes in the battlefield. But the FOF tagging. Would be good in unfamiliar terrain.
"I think I will take a crate for my boys, sarge."
"Okie-do. Just sign out in your 'pad."
The intercom buzzed.
"Sargent Koffi, prepare the weapons stack I just sent you. Put them in one crate, I will carry it all at once. Down in two," a gravelly voice emanated from the right corner of the armoury. Parisa could not help noticing that it was distinctly the Master Chief's.
"Will do, sir."
The intercom's red eye turned off after the message.
The sergeant checked his terminal, and started unloading crates from their shelves and repackaging them into a new metal container. Parisa had finished stacking her own equipment into two cases. She tried lifting one off the rubberised deck. Too heavy. She had anticipated the scopes to be heavy from her first feel, but not so ridiculously heavy. She must have lost her touch with her senses and misjudged the scopes' weights. Looking around, she saw no carts, only a heavy lifting droid. But her two cases of scopes did not warrant those. Now she would have to repack them and make two trips.
Parisa wiped the sweat from her brow and straightened up from her squat – in time to peer into the Master Chief's depolarised helmet. For a second she thought she saw a familiar face wrapped in the dark interior of the helmet. The Spartan brought up the helmet's polarised gold tint almost immediately, before Parisa had time to look at his face properly. She had the weakening sensation of déjà vu race down her spine, and she was caught in between feeling that she had dreamed of this before, and that this was a situation she had been caught in before. Looking down on me from above, this sensation, bursting full of hope, yet infinitely pierced with despair. Parisa had to fight to catch her breath.
"Allow me, ma'am," he said looking down at her as his index finger hooked the case away from her sweaty palm. That was about twenty bloody kilos. The Spartan did not break a sweat. He flicked shut the other case still on the floor and locked it in one lightning movement, and piled it on his already-waiting crate the the sergeant had prepared for the platoon. The Spartan grabbed the crate by its handles on either side and hefted. It left the ground silently in one fluid, effortless motion that Parisa would never have thought possible if she had not seen it done today.
"Where to, ma'am?" Nothing signalling the feat that had just been performed. It struck Parisa as ghostly, and apprehension tickled her outermost senses.
"Aft, section two-two bravo." The Master Chief turned the corner with a smart flick of the heels.
"Chief." He set the crate onto the deck before setting the two cases of scopes upright, side by side at the corner of her company's compartment.
"Ma'am." The way the Spartan said it as a statement made her feel even more unsure and curious at the same time. Parisa froze for four heartbeats, each falling with a reverberating thump-thump. Thump-thump. Thump-thump. Thump-thump.
"Ma'am?" This time it came on softer.
"Unvisor, please, Chief." It must have been Parisa's subconscious speaking, because she had no idea as to why she did. The small muscle under her voice-box had told her to do it, just like that. Spontaneous. Her brain was still feeling blood-drained from déjà vu. Maybe her muddled mind suffered more from the cold in the corridors than she had anticipated. Now that blood starting to flush up to her cold cheeks, she had an intense scratchy pain that she felt she had to bear no matter what happened. It was something like a fee for asking. Shame and pain, point taken. But she could not shy away from asking; her curiosity would not be quelled with anything less that seeing the face under the helmet.
"Pardon, ma'am?" The Chief's returned in its full coarseness. Almost like an awkward cough? The Chief's uncharacteristically uncertain response only inflamed her irrational need to know. She took a gamble. Faith guide me.
"I'm pulling rank Chief." She gulped. She felt like she had just swallowed her own heart. It was not easy to pull rank on someone deadlier than the entire UNSC put together. Parisa did not need augmented eyes to see how the Chief boarded up.
"Ma'am." The Chief with his stoic response again. Not today. Not when we are all going to hell whether we like it or not.
"You heard me, Chief. I need to know the person I am fighting with."
There was a long silence. Only the barely audible articulation of the MJOLNIR's armour plates were heard. Parisa stared through the visored helmet but saw nothing except her own reflection. How did the Spartans live without anyone giving them eye-to-eye, face to face encouragement? Was everyone already dead to them? Would death be the same to them?
The Master Chief reached up for his helmet's latch and broke open the seals. The armour hissed as the internal air cycle was disrupted. The Spartan underneath emerged from behind a puff of condensed mist. A grimace was not what she expected. Did Spartans hate open air so much?
"Ma'am." The huge person who stood in front of her was looked down. His short hair was almost completely bleached white, his complexion fairer than Norwegian models. A jolt of recognition hit her hard from behind. The freckles. What in the world was – It was an unmistakable map. Like how the maps that she had studied and committed to memory before a bloody battle were now ghosts that haunted her, this one also clung firmly to the recesses of her mind. She had dreamt about this map earlier, longer, and more than she had for any other. She tried reaching up to touch the man's face, but he caught her hand halfway, and returned it to her side. She blinked, and saw her eyes blur from welling up tears. All the old wounds her heart bore, all those she thought had healed, no, hardened, after all these years out in the battlefield, were starting to split open. Every heartbeat seemed to feel more painful than the last.
"John."
"Ma'am." The Spartan rocked her shoulder gently with an armoured hand. The armour on her fatigues felt unworldly at this moment – After so long? Parisa choked on a hiccup.
No stop saying "ma'am" over and over just say my name just say you are John and say you know me saymynamelikeyouusedto –
"Ma'am. I am Sierra one-one-seven, Master Chief Petty Officer of the United Nations Space Command Navy, not John."
He looked straight ahead, eyes with the glazed look of soldiers who have seen it all. He blinked at the end before turning to face Parisa.
"Lieutenant, this," John reached for the chain around his neck and tore it away, breaking the chain and sending small metal rings cascading onto the deck, "is a lucky charm from a while back."
It wasn't a while. It was decades. Decades spent together with the token, decades of vitality imbued into it from whatever the war left over to the Spartan. Parisa carefully reached for her own, hiding in her left thigh pocket, and gripped it hard, almost out of breath. The tails half of her own half-coin glimmered softly in the harsh ship lighting. The last doubt she had about John was erased as the Spartan pressed the token into her right palm. It was shaking as much as it did the first time she fired a rifle.
As she slowly clasped it in her fingers, a singular tear drop rolled down her face. She knew that it was John, the John she knew years back. What hurt her was his denial, his coldness. How long had it been since he could have contacted her. He could have chosen to tell her the other time at New Mombasa. But he did not. The two half-coins were finally reunited, held now in her two hands, but they felt strangely empty.
"I was told not to make a girl a promise I cannot keep."
Parisa sucked in through her nose, clearing it of mucus, and rubbed away the tears from her eyes. She retracted inwards with a scared whimper. Had I lost John a second time?
"Shikashi otōto wa," the Spartan started, massive gauntlet still on her shoulder, "anata wo issho ni, mada koko ni aru."
His eyes bored holes in hers. Yes, those were his hazel eyes. Unwavering, they meant exactly what he had said. Parisa understood him perfectly through his imperfect Japanese.
"And you will always be, as long as you never forget."
Parisa looked down at her own boots, and squeezed her eyes shut. She did not want the image of John to disappear ever again.
A new tear drop joined into the first's trail down her cheek. Parisa quenched a rising sob.
She heard the soft clipping of John's boots getting farther and farther away, receding rapidly after he turned out of the section.
She slowly relaxed her eyes, and they opened by a seam. His boots were gone. It took all her strength to look up, to dispel all hopes that he would still be there, smiling warmly as he once had thirty years ago in front of the sparkling waters of Lake Gusev. He was gone. Parisa's side fell onto the bulkhead, on which she thumped her barely clenched fist. Weakly at first, but with growing strength, and she pounded it until her entire arm was numb.
She felt the salty tang of tears and mucus in her mouth, but it could not bother her. Pressing on the bulkhead for support, she slid down to the floor and hugged her knees. All those years that have passed in a flash came crashing down on her. She had completed her decades long marathon, and was panting, gasping, for respite. Runs always feel worse after completing them, not when doing them. All her eyes could see were floating images of John and herself under the artificial Elysium sun.
She paged all the section leaders still under her command to collect the scopes. They would see me on the floor, hugging myself like a lost child. Pull yourself together.
But for her leaded knees and ravaged heart, Parisa felt that sitting was not so bad an option after all.
Oh damn that took a long time. That's all I have to say. Hope you enjoyed and would continue waiting for the next chapter!
