A/N: Hello. I'm back in America. This chapter marks the point of departure from First Strike: for those of you that don't know, the blue crystal was an element from that book, and Halsey finding a shard facilitates basically the rest of the Halo expanded universe. My use for it is almost done. I gave my characters some leeway here and the story is going in an unexpected direction even for me, but I hope it enables more characterization. Six and Jorge were always supposed to be the focus of the story, and I want to be able to delve more into who they are. Also, the last bit of this came from me pretty much asking myself 'What would Bungie do?', so if the action scene feels cursory that's because ideally you can imagine yourself playing it. Also, wordswithout wrote some dialogue in this one.

XXV.

Six woke up surrounded by light. She thrashed, trying to get the Hunter's foot off her so she could...maybe she could grab the knife Jorge had dropped...

There was no ground beneath her.

The thrash became a gradual upward curve of her body as she failed to fight against the strange forces around her. She looked around, the movement following the natural drift of her surroundings. A few more blinks and she saw that it she was in a gravity lift. The pastel blue, glowing column was carrying her upward, small, shining motes of dust traveling with her. She could see the cave walls sliding by.

The tiered room was far, far below.

Six twisted around, reaching for whatever weaponry she had on her, but there was nothing. Quick stock of the situation revealed the door to a Covenant ship getting quickly closer above her, and another gravlift meters away, holding Jorge: he looked as knocked out as she had been. Elites and other aliens were still gathered in the room below her. There was no sign of the other Spartans, on her HUD or near the side of the cave where she could just make out the uneven rock of the second passageway.

She caught a glimpse of blue sky between two rounded Covenant ships before she floated inside one of them. The walls were all purple, veined through with a fatty-looking white. There were Elites waiting for her, three of them and a cadre of Skirmishers. The Skirmishers looked, as usual, perpetually confused with their messy mohawk of white feathers. An iris door closed below her.

Just as Six was wondering how they were going to get her down, the gravlift was reversed. Her stomach lurched as she drifted toward the floor and ended up on all fours against it. A headache gradually made itself known behind her left ear; the Hunter must have rattled her around in her helmet. She tasted for broken teeth and didn't find any, but there was probably going to be a nasty bruise on her cheek any time now... she couldn't have been out long, though. She wasn't dizzy. They must just have shoved her into the gravlift as fast as they could. Where was Relk? For that matter, why was Six still alive?

Elites moved in on her as Jorge, now standing, got the same treatment on the other side of the bay and was hidden from her view. There were a lot of aliens here, more at one time than she'd fought on the Long Night of Solace. They must have figured out that Spartans could take them if they came in waves. It was also obvious that this was a staging area for a large attack: either it had been a force intended for Reach's surface that had been diverted, or that blue crystal was really, really important...about as important as Halsey had made it sound.

One Elite stood apart from the others, its hands at its sides. It turned away as soon as Six met its stare. (Funny how she was starting to be able to tell them apart...)

Others waded into the gravlift column to surround her. Six didn't think that trying to talk would help. She raised her hands, but a shovel-sized Elite paw came down on each fist. Her hands were dragged behind her back. The Elites didn't have handcuffs: they didn't usually take prisoners. Instead, they just held on and tossed their heads like animals that had smelled something they didn't like. There was a lot of discussion in their language going on. Six looked around for a weapon she could steal.

Another set of Elites were surrounding Jorge, restraining his hands and bearing down on his shoulders. Six fought down both the various ways she could think of to get out of this and the question of why they weren't dead. Covenant didn't take prisoners. Common belief was that it was dishonorable according to their complex merit system. But then, Elites didn't usually spend a lot of time running away from their own people while in human company either. Maybe Relk was behind this.

The crowd of Elites pushed her toward a purple-lacquered corridor, another five aliens following with Jorge. A distant rumbling sound seemed to indicate the ship starting to move. Six made eye contact with Jorge. Both his weapon and backpack had been taken from him. For a moment, Six thought angrily about the loss of her knife. Jorge looked relaxed, though, almost as if he were walking to the mess hall back with Noble Team. Six looked back at the corridor ahead of her, trusting her mask to do all the intimidation she needed to do here.

The ship was smaller than the Solace but a decent-sized living space in its own right. Her captors passed a few closed doors before turning to go into a brig with two energy-shielded cells facing one another. The hallway between them was only about six feet wide. After some discussion and gnashing of teeth, the Elites pushed both Spartans into one cell. Six could see the control panel for the cells, a stack of lacquer near the hallway wreathed with holographic displays in vivid colors. A hologram in the shape of a stylized Elite with the long body and flowing mane of a Chinese dragon hovered over it for a moment: Six assumed this to be the ship's AI.

The Elites slapped the energy shield down on the cell and glowered. They seemed to want to say something, but couldn't: the language and the plasma were the barriers. The Spartans stared back up at them. When they turned and left. Six started banging on the wall, trying to get through, trying to find where the plasma field was coming from.

Relk rode a gravlift with the shipmaster of Ascendant Desolation, the small drop ship that had found him. Accompanying them was a subaltern, a devotee of the Prophets specifically educated to know their rules and ways. He couldn't take his eyes off the crystal Relk held in his arms. No one had told Relk to get rid of the crystal once he'd grabbed it: in fact, they all looked a bit afraid of it.

People looking at him like they were afraid of him was a new thing for Relk.

He and the shipmaster watched as the unconscious Spartans floated up other gravlifts. The silence was spiky.

Relk quietly asked, "What's going to happen to them?"

The shipmaster's reply was instant. "Don't talk to me, betrayer. I've heard what you've done. And you smell like cave. It's bad enough having an Arbiter's name attached to this planet...but now someone who's consorted with humans, too?"

Relk hung his head. The subaltern looked between the two other Sangheili with wide eyes. "My pardon, exalted shipmaster, but I think we need to take into consideration that this...what was your name?"

"Me?" said Relk.

"Yes."

"Relk 'Forsovai."

"...this 'Forsovai has been chosen by the Forerunners. He found the sacred object that two armies have been warring for."

Relk thought, desperately, I tripped over it in a dark cave. However, desperation was a good state of mind in which he could be able to know not to say things like that. He also couldn't fail to notice that no one addressed him by, or seemed to care about, his rank title. That was probably one of the things he was going to have to kiss goodbye very soon.

The shipmaster wasn't having any of it anyway. "His name is on the feed as a deserter. You could have had an honorable death aboard the Solace, 'Forsovai. Instead, you ran away."

The plain words, spat out with a good deal of emphasis, set Relk's shame right down on him. Coward was the worst thing you could call a Sangheili. The Forerunners hadn't created them to run away.

"And then you joined up with humans." The shipmaster shook his head as if trying to dispel even the thought of why someone would do that. "I haven't killed you right now only because the Forerunners seem to have chosen you to find this valuable object. If it is impious of me to wish otherwise..."

Apparently it was, because the subaltern looked at the shipmaster sharply and he shut up.

The three of them floated into the ship. Relk wouldn't have said before that he missed Sangheili architecture, but the sight of the walls, any walls, felt comfortably familiar to him. Even the curves just seemed...nice. He tried not to think about the fact that walking back into his familiar world meant possibly walking into a death sentence for treachery.

The humans must have been brought into another troop bay nearby, because Relk couldn't see them anywhere.

The shipmaster immediately started stomping off, and when the subaltern followed and surreptitiously placed Relk between the two of them, Relk had to follow. The shipmaster looked back at him with a glare. "Why don't we go see how your friends are getting on?"

Relk couldn't exactly protest. The shipmaster led him through more corridors. He was still holding the crystal, which had started to get heavy. It wasn't glowing any more, and any danger from it had seemed to die down...probably because it knew it was in the proper hands now. Guards appeared from either side, surrounding both Relk and the subaltern, presumably for the latter's protection from the former. Acolytes of the subaltern showed up too, and Relk was directed to give the crystal to them. He did. They'd use it as part of an alter or something...and he could rest his arms.

They emerged at a vantage point above a large staging area, and Relk could see the Spartans, easily visible because of Six's bright orange armor, being led away into a hallway right underneath him. The shipmaster's immediate subordinate, an Ultra also identifiable by his bright silver color, had been standing in the center of the large room with his arms folded. The large weapon Jorge usually held had been left at his feet as a trophy. He looked up, found the shipmaster, and headed for a ramp up to the balcony. As they waited for him to come close enough to speak, Relk looked at his guards. Some of them looked younger than he was. They stared with uniformly angry expressions.

When the mate arrived, Relk saw that he was a short Sangheili, not nearly as tall as Relk, with bright blue flecks in his eyes. The sword hilt stuck to his thigh indicated that he would have the 'ai' honorific at the end of his name, but that's where Relk's information about him ended. "This has been the strangest capture ever, of all time," the Ultra began. "They're just standing there, allowing us to put them in the holds. Why are they doing that?"

The subaltern looked completely confused. Relk found himself in the rare position of being both calmer and more informed than someone around him. That didn't mean he could keep the nervous tremor out of his voice. "Maybe they want to be ambassadors?"

"To us or to the Forerunners?" the shipmaster asked with sincere curiosity.

"To us." Relk could answer that one easily. He knew that Jorge would want to make peace between the species if he had the chance, especially after their journey together. Also, it was really nice to just be able to talk in a language he was fluent in and his was desperate to say anything that would keep him alive. "The Forerunners do not concern them."

"But they were after the crystal."

"They were after it because they knew we were after it. It was a resource to them, like water."

"Odd." The shipmaster could have been looking at a previously unknown species of plant. "It seems that you know a lot about the mindset of these demons. You stayed with them long enough. Weren't you planning to gut them in their sleep at some point?"

"I'm not sure sure they're actually demons...technically. Sir. Also there were a lot of them."

"Their very secular mindset means that they are different from us, maybe irrevocably."

The subaltern spoke up, which Relk was grateful for. It meant he didn't have to wonder when the shipmaster was going to order the guards to start clubbing him. "That does not mean that 'Forsovai has changed his mindset. Has he?"

Relk said, "No. I still believe in the Forerunners." This was completely true. It wasn't like the Spartans had tried to convert him to whatever they believed in. It was obvious that the Forerunners had existed. They'd left crystals and caves.

The subaltern said, "Someone with close knowledge of the humans could be useful to us." He locked gazes with the shipmaster, then turned to Relk. "Would you be willing to help out?"

"I'm, I'm not..." instead of 'cut out for this' or 'brave' or 'really all that magical', Relk said, "sure."

"Look," said the shipmaster. "Their mindset has affected him. He's a traitor. Put him in a cell next to the demons. Maybe they'll tear each other apart."

The guards grabbed Relk's arms. Another patted him down for weapons, but didn't find any and gave a snort of disapproval. Relk wasn't sure whether the guard was looking for an excuse to beat him or just thought that a swordmaster not having a sword was yet another mark of shame on his nearly obscured record. As if in an afterthought, the shipmaster started talking on his comm to someone, telling them to prepare a space for Relk somewhere besides the brig.

Relk started babbling. Maybe there was some hope in what the subaltern said. He could help out. He'd tell the shipmaster what he knew about humans. He knew that they didn't really care about honor, which sounded pretty great right now. He knew some things about their weaponry and, well, their word games. But he was nervous, and instead of an efficient list of the services he could provide to the intelligence community, his reply came out as : "Maybe, but-I mean, you said they were irrevocably different. That means that you plan on ...voking...them...ah, making them less different, at some point? Is that the aim of the Zealots?"

The shipmaster rounded on him, big and dark. "It's not your place to say what our aim is any more."

And with that, Relk felt, he was shut out of Sangheili society. He didn't have honor. The subaltern was too cowed to say anything else. Somebody else would figure out what the crystal was and Relk would rot in a cell...again.

He stared at the floor.

He could try to die honorably, fighting his way out of here, but...he just really didn't want to get hurt, which was a shame unto itself. Frozen with indecision, Relk went along with it as the guards started pushing him along. He was only alive at this point because they thought they might get information out of him. Sangheili had to show unusual restraint in this war...

The subaltern, backed by some more acolytes who told him that the crystal was safely stowed, spoke up. "The crystalline device found in the cave is incredible. One of the first unique pieces of Forerunner tech we've found in hundreds of years. Part of it does appear to be missing - one facet was left behind in the cave. It fell off in the fight."

"Well, go pick it up." The shipmaster didn't even look at him.

Relk tried to remember when the piece of the crystal had fallen off. Things were sortof a blur after Six had hung onto him.

The shipmaster said, "We will retrieve it. We are still engaged down there. The rest of the demons will be taken care of."

The female scientist and the rest of the Spartans were still in the caves somewhere. Relk wondered what would happen to them and whether they would pick up the part of the crystal he had left behind, but that didn't really matter to him right now. And besides, the crystal seemed to change its properties based on who was holding it or what it felt it wanted to do at the moment. The future was uncertain for everybody. His own future was just the most important to him.

"That part of the crystal is a matter for the ground commander now." The shipmaster looked at his Ultra, who nodded in a 'I'm going to take care of this' kind of manner. "That has nothing to do with the fact that I've now got this whelp on my hands." He looked back at Relk, eyes narrowed. Relk shivered.

"Well, he did lead us to the crystal," the subaltern said quietly.

They had arrived at a door. This wasn't even a proper brig, equipped with a force field and sundry security measures: it was pretty much just a closet. It was a small ship and they might not have wanted him conspiring with the humans. (Relk wasn't even sure what he would do if he saw Six and Jorge right now. Actually offer to work for their side if they got him out of here, or start on a multi-language diatribe about how much he hated them and this was all Jorge's fault?) Someone had cleared out everything in the closet except for what looked like a Grunt's deck-polishing cloth in preparation for him. The shipmaster wouldn't give Relk the honor of being housed like someone who was dangerous. Honestly, Relk couldn't blame him.

It looked like the contingent of guards was going to stay, though. One of them shoved him against the door before opening it and pushing him inside. Relk was feeling more aches than he'd known he had, and a couple new ones started. He got one good look at the shipmaster before the guard closed the door.

The shipmaster seemed to take the subaltern's words into consideration. He growled. "He'll get what he deserves."

It took a lot to break Six but there was this unnatural antsiness to her now. It was just injustice that she had come out of a cave just to be stuck in a cell. She wanted to run. She tried to pull at the edges of the walls with her fingers, clawing and grasping and cursing the slick surface of her gloves.

Jorge put a hand on her shoulder. "Wait. Wait."

Six stopped, looked back.

He said, "We aren't going to get anywhere if we break out while the ship's still moving." He was looking out past the force field, not quite at the AI. His voice was low and distant, in that tactical mindset like he got when looking out at Reach. Here they weren't fighting through farmers' fields, but he still sounded that same way.

Six could feel the truth of what he said: the ship's engines were rumbling under her feet. It was a Covenant corvette, small enough to be inserted into atmosphere but larger than the Phantoms or other troops carriers that were pretty much just one large room inside. She remembered the schematics from her Falcon team. This ship was either moving along under Reach's atmosphere or going higher to get to slipspace, and from the loud noise of the engines it was the latter. If they tried to escape now they'd just end up in a ship that even Six didn't know how to drive.

"We just need to wait. Stay ready. Something will happen-"

"That's your solution?" Six wanted to scream. she wanted to dig through the force field, dig under it or climb over it or run through it, let her skin turn to boils and ash from the close contact to the plasma. "They're probably going to kill us. How long can we just hang out?"

"Trust me," he said, and he sounded so stoic-so accepting-Six wanted to rip his helmet off and find out if there was any fear in there that he would speak in her language.

"I have been trusting you," she said, "and it got me stuck in a cave for a week." She didn't smile when she said it. not that it mattered much, what with the helmet...nothing but faceless shapes, all of them, drones with personalities piped in after the fact. He had different chemicals from her. He wasn't programmed to love properly. Why was it so hard to draw him out?

It wasn't that she wanted him to trust her and follow her in everything, just like she wouldn't want to follow him blindly. There just needed to be more communication.

She thought, "We need to be soldiers. We can't wait around for orders because there aren't any coming..." and you aren't going to give them, she thought but didn't say. He'd always been solid ground for her, but now they needed to jump and he couldn't stay behind with his feet on the deck. He folded his arms, looked out through the swirling plasma.

They both looked up as Elite footsteps sounded in the hallway outside. Six wondered whether it would be Relk, but then saw three hulking Elites in armor colors that were new to her. The all had very dark skin, less bluish than Relks, as if their skin was thicker. The foremost one was holding the blue crystal that had been the cause of all this.

Six and Jorge retreated from the front of the cell as the aliens approached, even though they were only allowed a few feet of space. The Elites turned their heads like monsters with mouths full of something that turned out to be just more mouth.

Whatever they were saying, they didn't seem to think the Spartans needed to understand it. All their words were addressed to the three of them and maybe to the crystal as they bobbed it around. The Elite that Six started to think of as the head honcho, priest, or exorcist kept gesturing with the crystal and repeating things like they were prayers.

Jorge said, "Look at that. They're trying to decide how holy we are."

She looked at him, raised an eyebrow. "Still so calm."

"I'm ready to rip their heads off if they come any closer. It's just not nice to say so in a language they can understand."

The eyebrow went further. "Like you speaking Hungarian to me?"

Might as well have a proper human argument if there were aliens doing some kind of religious ritual in front of you and it didn't seem to require you to be paying attention.

Jorge looked down at her. She could tell from the feed in his helmet cam that he was still keeping an eye on the Elites. "That was a long time ago, Six. That was before."

"Before the Solace?"

"Before I decided it was worth dying for you." He said it calmly. It shocked her a little. She thought that maybe the calm wasn't a problem, it was just the way he was (and the way he was, he cared for her.) She could adopt his calm, even though she was worried about how they would get out of here and why the Elites were even keeping them alive. Six jumped feet-first into emotions and battlefields and maybe that was why the calmness had annoyed her. She reached out and wrapped her hand around Jorge's even though the plate on the back of his hand kept her from getting a good grip. Even Elites could probably figure out that language. He pressed his fingers in tightly around hers and watched the show in front of them.

Whatever conclusions he had come to didn't seem to please the head honcho. He gestured angrily to the guards around him, and they rounded on the Spartans with weapons raised.

The force field went down. Six lunged forward, but the Elite guards were all around her in seconds. Her hand swung, happened to find a sword handle, heavy and cold like crystal. It wasn't meant for hands the size of hers but the Elite was bending down like to bite her, and the sword was right there. It had a button to press. How hard could that be?

The blade speared the Elite through the leg. The guard roared, and Six cut through the rest of its leg. Jorge was struggling with the other Elites. Six blinked, tagging the end of the hall on her HUD as their mission objective. The message was clear: we need to get out of here. The head Elite was still hanging back.

The sword was a beautiful thing, light as a feather but somehow balanced. It was made of what was surely the plasma ubiquitous to Covenant technology, but looked like pure light, sky-blue and sparkling. She carved through two Elites with one swing before the others started shooting. A loud crack was Jorge breaking an Elite's arm. Six pushed another arm aside in an effort to lunge at the aliens' leader and felt two impacts hit her back. Her shield strength plummeted but she could tell by the sounds behind her that Jorge was smashing someone against a wall. Six grabbed the leader by the throat. He panicked, beating at her arms and shoulders in smacks that would have hurt her if she hadn't been armored. As it was they just cleared the way to his throat. Even Elite priests kept guns at their sides. He went for it, and Six pinned him to the wall on the sword. The crystal fragment thunked on the floor.

Jorge was already headed for the end of the hall.

They fought their way through the ship, navigating by memory and by which direction the aliens were coming from. It wasn't a large ship, so the remaining Elite crew threw a steadily dwindling supply of Grunts at them with gusto. Six kept the sword and found that she liked it, the almost unbelievable way one slash peeled a Grunt's armored shell open. Jorge had captured a plasma rifle that looked like a small, angry animal skull, its mouth breathing green fire.

When they reached the troop bay, only one Elite and three Grunts were guarding the translucent field in the floor where the gravlift originated. The Elite held a sword and had Jorge's turret gun on its back. Six didn't think she could take an Elite in a swordfight, not when she was slashing around based mostly on knife-fighting techniques and common sense. She switched to a plasma pistol she'd picked up from a Grunt, the sword magnetizing to her leg as easily as it had to the Elite's. Her thigh armor was still cracked and uneven.

Jorge broken into a run across the large room. Six shouted, "Activate the gravlift!" as the Grunts rushed toward her.

Through the purple sheen of the force field she could see grass and mountains below. The ship hadn't gone into space yet: it hadn't even passed into the clouds. Maybe the Covenant were refitting human bases and this ship had been headed toward one. Either way, it meant the Spartans could escape to the ground.

She shot two Grunts before they got to her, rupturing the air packs on their backs. Another lobbed a grenade. It stuck to the floor next to Six's feet, and she jumped over it just before it exploded into blue fire behind her. She saw Jorge slap a holographic display next to the gravlift and look down into the diamondy surface of the field as it started shimmering even more, dust particles floating downward. He looked back at her, then jumped.

Six followed.