Chapter 22
The dreams they induced were of no help to them, so I stayed silent, they would know what little I had soon enough. My body was in a constant and tortuous state of shock. Between malnourishment, the gruelling abuse and the lack of proper sleep, my spirits were steadfastly becoming about as roaring as a sickly new-born lion cub, mewling for attention from a mother that knows it can't save it.
When passed out, my mind would take me anywhere but where they wanted. Once I actively tried seeking out the voices in my head but I was reposted by a searing hot pain in my skull for the effort,
Bornstellar wants nothing more to do with me, it seems.
I was being unfair, the less I knew, the less I could give them and the more they would need from me.
Buy yourself time, Maddie. There's one thing left to try to before I give them what I do know…
Escape!
That was easier said than done. Currently, there was an almighty commotion erupting between the two beasts that held me captive. Ketarus had taken to trying to beat the truth from me, forcing me to surrender the information under the threat of pain. Erun believed me to be susceptible to coaxing the information from conversation and goading.
"The girl wants to learn. Let her understand and give us what we want." Erun growled.
"You sound like you care for it, brother." Ketarus replied with a savage tone in his voice.
"I care that she lives because we need what she knows. She is no use to us dead." He shot back, his voice dripping with venom.
I'd been lying loosely on the floor in a puddle of limbs, blood and sick for about an hour, listening to the pair of them debate in sangheili. I had no real idea as to what they were really saying, in truth, but their tones were clear and trying to figure out the meaning of their words made coping easier. So far, I knew my own pronouns, kill, and sword.
I figure that's what they all learn first. It's not like they need to know anything else…
That awful device was discarded lazily near the armour in the corner, tossed aside when I was last knocked unconscious from the pain. Escape was the last thing I could try before I would have to give them what they wanted, luckily, that information would probably save my life if they caught me. I'd already come close, really close, to giving it to them already. Only the sheer oppressive weight of that pain on my soul stopped me from blurting out everything I knew, right down to the type of faucets we used to have on the kitchen sink.
Keeping still was easy, the two beasts murmuring to themselves either weren't interested in the fact that I had come around once more, or didn't care. I must have looked dead though, blood crusted on my face along with drool, vomit and bile, hocked from my stomach during the last rounds of torture. My shooting arm was a burned and mangled mess. Jack would do his best to keep the damned thing set but the fracture was killing me, the pain rifled through my body like a black market back-alley bullet, tearing and blasting apart my flesh with reckless abandon.
The only thing that really kept me sane was all the information swanning about my head. The way the covenant interacted with each other, their caste system, their language, their architecture, their religion, the things I'd learned about the forerunners…
Most interestingly however, was that strange voice in my head during my dream at the bottom of that elevator shaft. Something else was in my head, something that wasn't Bornstellar, or his A.I. The presence was almost familiar, not invasive like the other forerunner but appeared to feel similar, as though it were a part of my consciousness, rather that something that was implanted by some alien device. My mind spun and tried to keep track of it all for when I got back to the UNSC.
"Human…" came a gruff voice from high above me. I was shaken awake and coughed blood from my mouth as he roughly handled me back to 'consciousness'. "You live."
"No thanks to you" I managed to groan from below him, spitting blood wildly in his direction.
It missed but he slammed me to the floor regardless. I played the broken prisoner and I played it well, whimpering and mewling in an unceremonious clump of misery on the floor.
"Pathetic. Are you ready to talk, now? I grow tired of this."
I remained silent, struggling for the words to pick. Looking up at him with heavy eyes and rage in my heart, I noticed Ketarus shake his head and prepare to leave.
Erun's baton was still in the corner nearest me, the helmet and armour were there too, but I had little time to get any of it.
The cell's shielding dropped and I smelled my moment, hoisting myself to my feet with all the energy I had saved over the last hour, bundling over Erun, who did not expect the sudden burst of energy. He staggered back and I lunged for the baton, grabbing the terrible device and slamming it into the roof of his jaw.
Ketarus turned briefly, expecting to see Erun strike me in frustration but instead, I jammed the rod into his knee and burst past him, clocking him around the back of the head as I fled passed him. I ran down the corridor with the wind rushing in my face. Left I turned, startling a jackal that screeched loudly to his friend and yelped a series of panicked squawks. Before he knew what to do, I was out of reach. A round burst from behind me, followed by scurrying and shouting. Around the corner was a grunt, he took one almighty kick to the face and fell backwards, scattering his pistol across the floor. I lunged for it and rolled, collapsing behind cover as Erun roared further down the corridor. Popping from cover, I laid a flurry of shots down the long pathway of the main cellblock, the green spots splattered into the jackal as he finally gave chase.
They pursuers dove for cover and I didn't hesitate, moving away with all the grace of a stampeding rhino. The chase continued, off the right I was bound, flying with desire and yearning for the freedom I had always taken for granted.
I could hear Erun bounding after me with loud and terrible pounding hoofs. Shots echoed out of the purple hues of the corridors and I ducked heading for an exit that I had predicted was just around the corner.
Where is it?!
There was nothing here, save for a thoroughfare that lead to a large hanger. Erun slid into view behind me and growled. I charged a shot and let it loose, forcing the Elite to duck for cover. Again, I threw myself forward and entered the upper gantry that ran around the length of the hangar. Stumbled a little and felt the deck vibrate fiercely, glancing back I saw Erun running at full pelt towards me, his frame large and imposing enough to put the fear of God in me. I clambered away and up to a prong that struck out into the hangar where a forked dropship hovered, its engine humming.
With all my remaining strength, I threw myself at it, landing with a painful thunk onto the top of the hull.
A second thunk nipped any hope I had in the bud.
Stood towering over me, was the gleaming face of Erun, whose breath bore down at me like hot steam. I shuddered as a pit was split wide open in my stomach, with one effortless movement the Elite picked me up and tossed me back onto the gantry.
"You lied to me." He said, as the rest of his soldiers caught up with him, pushing pistols and rifles into my face.
"I did" I said, well aware of the fact I might die.
"You will talk."
The brand on my shoulder ached, my arms and legs burned and my head swam, pulsing like a shattered arm. He had abandoned the baton now. Only the blade hummed in his taught fist, defying me to try something with him.
"I-"
He moved the blade to my throat and I seized up.
"The next words from your mouth better be useful, or they will be your last."
I swallowed.
"Didact." I said, hoarsely.
The effect was immediate. The circle of grunts around me yelped in surprise, one even fainted, as the crowd recoiled in a state of sheer awe.
"Go on."
"I spoke to him" I continued, looking around me, "it was his orb, I think"
Erun blinked, "You… spoke with the Didact?"
There were cries erupting around me, particularly from the brutes and grunts. The jackals seemed inconvenienced but the Elites, if my guess was correct, seemed on-edge.
Erun made a swift series of motions with his hand and nodded at Ketarus, who spoke to his pack and backed away with them after a very short and very loud conversation. The Elite then turned to me and scooped me up in his arms, almost carefully, I thought.
Well… that could have gone worse.
I silently thanked Bornstellar for the information and congratulated myself on withholding as much information from the Elite as I could manage before I was taken back to the torture cell and dumped in a pile away from the armour, with Erun locking the seal behind him.
"How did he appear to you?" he asked, folding his arms.
"After you took me, he appeared as a sort of vision in my head. He wanted to protect me."
The Elite began to pace, repeating this for a minute or two until Ketarus entered the room. The pair of them spoke and Ketarus called into a comm unit, slipping out of the room and standing guard as the Elite grilled me with searing eyes, burning with awe and poorly hidden passion.
"Protect… you?" he asked, a quiver in his voice.
I nodded, hoping to show him I was being as truthful as possible, there was no telling how severe my punishment would be if he caught even a whiff of deception.
"Why?"
"He wouldn't say, he just said I would understand eventually. I think he meant to protect me."
"From what?"
I laughed. It was painful and sharp and it elicited a groan from me as I coughed and spluttered.
Erun didn't find it funny. He gruffly grunted and leaned into my face; baring his teeth.
"From you" I said, deadly serious.
He reeled, stepping backwards a little as he frowned in a look of terror.
"Us? He means to protect you, from us?" he asked, the disbelief on his alien face was telling. You didn't need to be an expert on them to know it was a shocking revelation, although the how or why it was so bad eluded me, I didn't think on it. Instead I silently prayed that this wasn't to be my last moment.
"You lie." He growled, "you lie and deceive."
"Why would I lie like that when it would just get me killed?"
"You wanted to die in that building. You must know something, something you will die to protect." He nodded himself, pacing the room like an expectant father.
"Th-that was before it spoke to me properly! It told me to say that, that it would save my life."
Erun grunted again and resumed pacing about the cell.
"What did it say about the Didact, which one was it?"
"What do you mean?"
Erun sighed.
"There were two of them."
He seemed hesitant, so I seized the opportunity to learn a little more, to direct the flow of the conversation.
"They were brothers? Your God's?"
"No. The forerunners were capable of many things. Things that would seem like magic to even my people. They… I do not know the word for it." he said, scratching his head.
"Changed?" I replied.
"You know of it?"
I shook my head, "my vision mentioned it, sort of."
He eyed me cautiously.
"Well a significant part of a forerunners life was that change. They would become genetically and biologically changed when they came of age."
"Like a butterfly?"
Erun didn't recognise the word but seemed to understand vaguely what I was getting at and shook his head.
"Not a strictly natural phenomenon. That we know of anyway. It likely stemmed from one, altered by their wisdom and holy right to technologies beyond our comprehension."
"Wow…" I said, genuinely amazed by what I heard. It appeared that the forerunners were beyond us in more ways than even the covenant were.
"Truly, the God's are a marvel, no?"
"They are." I agreed, hoarsely. "Would you help me understand them?"
This seemed to really take him back. His yellow beady eyes narrowed and bore into my skull like drills.
He was about to answer when the plasma shield of the cell deactivated and Ketarus arrived with an Elite honour guard and the Prophet of Redemption in tow.
"You started without me, Erun." He said, cooly.
"Forgive me, your holiness." He replied, bowing low. It was amusing to see him felled low by the grey skinned creature, burned and paraplegic in its hovering chair. It was unbecoming of him and his race. Evil though they were, to see them prostrate themselves for this thing was a little sad. They should be like us. Stood proudly and alone.
Maybe if they were, things would be different.
"Oh, I'm sure you meant nothing by it, my boy. Has the child said anymore?"
Erun looked at me, and then back towards his holy master.
"I believe she has seen the God's. Perhaps even one of the Didacts. She…" he paused uncomfortably, "wants to know the holy teachings"
"She what?" Ketarus scoffed, "she-"
The brute was silenced by the long tendril-like hand of the prophet, who commanded him with a quiet grace.
"Close the shield. Seal the sound inside."
Ketarus looked like he desperately wanted to object but thought better of it and obeyed. The shield zapped and slurped closed, leaving the cell feeling noticeably small with the brute and the prophet present. An uncomfortable silence hung in the room and I shivered, a cool terror enveloping me as the prophet considered me.
"Why?" he asked, plainly.
"She wants-" Erun began.
"I wasn't asking you, boy." He shot back, "I was asking her."
My mind raced, I was winging it. I had no idea where I was taking this but I couldn't afford to look a gift horse in the mouth.
"I wanted to learn" I replied.
"Fascinating. Truly fascinating!" he cooed, putting his hand to my cheek.
A terrible shiver coursed through my body, searching for my spine, as his leathery hands traced the contours of my face.
"To think we know so little of them. Are they all so malleable?"
Erun seemed tempered into a silent rage. The prophet seemed to miss it, but I saw that fury as plainly as I saw the dried blood on the floor in front of me.
Ketarus laughed and offered his piece; "if they were, this war would have ended with their admittance to the Covenant"
Erun shuddered.
"Quite so." The Prophet said, holding my chin in his hand and moving my face from side to side. "Perhaps if we could educate them from a young age, they could learn to walk the path."
"Holy Prophet…" Erun spoke quietly, stepping towards his master, "what you say… is deeply heretical."
"According to the hierarchs, yes. My good friend, the Prophet of truth has been waging this holy war for its entire duration. This discovery could change everything."
The prophet was a moron. It was clear as day that something greater was at work. Erun spoke as though only humans could activate forerunner artifacts and the covenant had destroyed a thousand worlds with billions of children on them. In 21 years, they had never bothered to study us? Or to educate us on their religious beliefs?
"I would answer anything you ask… if you help me understand. Just, please stop hurting me." I added the last part knowing it was pointless.
Let them think us weak. Let them think me defeated.
"Well, let us learn together, at least!" he said excitedly. "when do human's reach maturity?"
"It depends" I replied, truthfully.
"On what, exactly?"
"A lot of things" I said, cautiously, "Genetics, environment, experience, and sex."
"Yes, yes, but the average human female, what would that be?"
"Well legally, between the ages of 18 and 21. The brain stops developing around 25, the body varies a lot." I listed off the talking points as sincerely as I could.
"Shouldn't you know this stuff?" I asked, innocently.
"Studying your kind is a waste of time when you're so easy to kill" Ketarus laughed.
"Couldn't you be more efficient if you studied us?" I asked, genuinely curious as to the answer. "maybe use the God's gifts against us more efficiently?"
"It is a grave sin to use the gifts of the God's without the appropriate consent of scripture." The Prophet said, shrugging. All our technology is built from Forerunner designs, ordained by the holy prophets of the covenant as viable tools, equal in design to those of the gods and yet leaving the relics of the God's unsullied by our touch."
All of it?
"All of it? Even your ships?"
The Prophet beamed with pride. "Yes! Do you see now, what you could be? Oh, if only your kind had suppressed your brutal nature, you could stand among us and learn! You could aid us in the journey, rather than oppose us!"
I shook my head, "I don't think we ever could." I said genuinely. Humanity had taken a course of rugged individuality for a long time. Even collectivist philosophy was steeped in the idea that the common man's life would be bettered as part of the whole.
His expression hardened slightly, "And why is that?"
"It's not in our nature." I replied, bowing my head submissively.
The Brute snorted and shook his head. Erun looked conflicted, as though he were fascinated by our cultural exchange and equally repulsed by it.
"Very perceptive. Your kind is tenacious, I shall give you that." The Prophet mused.
"Deceptive, too" Erun said, grimly.
"Indeed." The Prophet agreed. "Which is why we must proceed cautiously. Information on the Didacts is scarce and should not be doled out to heretical human whelps without reason."
Erun nodded, sagely.
"We shall continue as before then, Erun. I expect you and the girl to get well acquainted, learn what you can about them, but the Didact's gifts must be identified and located. Don't scar her and don't kill her. I would have her given to Truth as a gift when we take the orb for ourselves."
He floated away, airily. With Erun in tow, Ketarus was left to finish what Erun started, grinning a sadistic and twisted mealy-mouthed grin as he advanced on me.
}{=}{
I woke on the bed in my shared cell with Jack, who was sleeping nearby. He was covered in bandages, sweat, and blood. His breath was ragged and laboured; he looked a mess.
Outside the cell, stood a small figure. It looked about, and peered through the plasma with dark little eyes. It was a grunt that stepped into the cell, adorned in white and carrying a cloth mask in its paw. Our eyes met and it offered the mask to me.
"What's this for?"
"So, you don't breathe your germs over him."
I blinked; it's English was incredible.
"What? Never seen a doctor before?" it sighed, before signalling a pair of jackals to enter the cell, depositing a workstation packed to the gills with medical equipment.
"uh, I didn't mean to insult-" I began.
"It's fine. You probably haven't seen one of our doctors before." He said, dryly.
"I didn't think-"
"That we try to save our dying? That we don't mourn the loss of our brothers by the thousand?"
I found myself groggily rising from the bed, watching the Grunt expertly undress and inspect the wounds on Jack's body.
"If you would let me finish." I said, quickly, "I was trying to apologise."
I wasn't sure why I was trying to say sorry to a member of a species that was wiping my own from existence. Something about it endeared me to it, he had a weariness about him, and an astute understanding of me before I had been able to finish two sentences.
"Pity for the Unggoy? Now, that is new." It said to itself, "I've seen it all now. I can die in peace knowing that the child of our greatest enemy pities my kind."
He spoke with a grainy drawl, a little like Jack but with a more childish ring to it.
"I was surprised, is all. I don't think my ignorance is my fault either, do you?"
The grunt paused, and cocked his head to the side in thought. "Guess not. You don't see my kind on the battlefield unless frenzied by doctrine and ready to die for the cause."
Again, I was knocked off-kilter by this seemingly heretical admission.
"Isn't that heretical?"
"When you are Unggoy, your very existence is a tolerated heresy. It is liberating to be so frank; the truth is that to an Unggoy, heresy is no more dangerous than breakfast. Did you know that the Prophet of Truth ordered one in every sixty of us killed on ships without a luminary? O-or that the casualty rate is eighty times higher for us than just the Kig-yar?"
I shook my head, but he wasn't looking at me. All the while he spoke, he had begun repairing my friend.
"What's a luminary?"
"A sort of beacon made by the God's. They direct our ships, pull them in the direction of Greater treasure."
"Is that what I found?" I asked, genuinely.
"I'm just a doctor." He replied, flatly.
"A heretical, human-aiding Grunt doctor, huh."
He didn't say anything for a while, instead deciding to work with his needle and thread, stitching wounds and the like as he diligently worked on my friend.
"What's your name?" I asked, swinging my legs out from the ledge that passed for a bed in the cell.
"Miplap."
"Maddie."
He shrugged, "You'll be dead soon enough, forgive me if I don't bother to learn it."
I wasn't quite sure how to react to that.
"They need me alive."
"Sure, they do" he shot back, sardonically. "They need you, for now. How long will they need your friend here? He hasn't got much left in him if you ask me. You've been here for almost two weeks, and your demon is no closer to rescuing you."
"Naomi's alive!?"
He shrugged again.
"Based on my casualty reports… yes." He shook his head solemnly and a devious and dastardly plan flowered in my mind.
Yes. That will do. It just might work, but I need to know more.
"Aren't they always this high?"
He winced and shuddered before shaking his head.
"No, not that high. Those demons of yours… they are ruthlessly precise. Efficient. Soulless. They're killers."
A pang of pride sparked in my chest.
Good to know that we make them hurt too.
"I don't know how you put up with it. You're clearly not like the others, so why even fight?"
"We don't choose this. We were crushed by the Covenant years ago. We had culture and art and reasons to create and build. Now, we're stagnant, easy-to-breed soldiers. We're-"
"Grunts."
He looked me in the eye with a fiery sadness that was almost haunting.
"Exactly. You human's see exactly what the more devout of my brothers do not."
"We see a lot, all thing's considered."
I had piqued the doctor's interest with that one.
"What do you see in the Zealot?"
"Erun?"
He nodded, before looking over his shoulder, his little alien eyes flickering with eager curiosity.
Erun is… a force of nature? A predator. A religious nut. A…
I smiled.
"Erun is a fool."
The small doctor let out a nervous laugh. It was genuine enough, but restricted by years of terror-induced paranoia.
"For all his power, his tactical mind, his ability to lead, and his prowess on the battlefield, he lacks the freedom to act. I almost laughed at him when he paws at the prophets crippled heels like a tiger-cub."
Miplap grinned, I think. It was hard to tell for his methane mask.
"He lets your people die in droves because he's too much of a coward to tell the prophet he's wrong. That loyalty will cost him one day."
"Soon, hopefully." The little doctor said, with a sigh.
"Hopefully" I added, with a smile.
Miplap nodded and finished his work. Pushing him any further was dangerous, for my plan to work, he had to make the final choice on his own. Grunt's were clearly more intelligent than they were given credit for, but they must be easy to control, or so many would not have remained loyal under such treatment.
It would really suck if I blew this opportunity.
My chance to escape.
To make them pay.