New York City's skyline had not looked awe-inspiring for over two decades. Not since the nuclear fire of Judgment Day had cleansed the boroughs of nearly all life. Then the survivors were whittled down even further by famine, disease, and radiation sickness. Those lucky few that did manage to come through alive had to face a new nightmare as the A.I. that started it all, SkyNet, began to systematically eliminate the survivors. They were rounded up and placed in camps outside the city. For years the city was a ghost town inhabited by rats and the eternal cockroach until the humans came back as the hardened military force known as TechCom. New York City, as it sometimes had been pre-Judgment Day, became a warzone. The fighting would wax and wane as fighting over other parts of the former United States of America took higher priority for both forces but it would always come back again in full force. So the scavengers and other humans that wanted no part of The Resistance often had brief reprieves from the constant struggle for survival.

Then the aliens arrived.

Those still old enough to remember the Old World, and there were not very many, had found it hard to believe that a computer was responsible for the downfall of man were so shocked by the sight of spaceships landing and attacking the terrifying foot soldiers of SkyNet that they were invariably incinerated by one side or the other where they stood.

New York's was that of a never-ending warzone as the alien hordes seek to gain a strong foothold in the city and surrounding area. Plasma flashes, on both sides, light up the night and day in blinding displays of light. Explosions shake the ground at least once every few minutes and sometimes collapse the warren-like dens of the human dregs that cling to a dismal existence among the ruins of the Old World. Aerocraft rove the airspace above New York, occasionally engaging in fierce sorties, in an attempt to establish air superiority. The Covenant Hegemony has ignored the humans, viewing them as insects to be swept aside when this war is decided, but SkyNet knew it would be a grave miscalculation on the invaders part.

"Shit, shit, shit."

Lieutenant Catherine Luna crouched atop a crumbling edifice high above the rubble-strewn streets of what had once been the Bronx. Many of the taller buildings in this section of the city had survived the nuclear bombardment of Manhattan and they made perfect cover for TechCom Infiltration and Disruption to get the lay of the land. She wished the land didn't look like it did, she wished that she was still a child; she wished that Judgment Day had never happened and she damn sure wished aliens weren't real.

That fantasy was once again dashed as one of the sleeker looking alien aircraft soared through the air a quarter mile away from her position. Luna, even though the sky was pitch black, could make out the four pods on the craft's sides that made it fly thanks to the plasma weapons scorching the air around it. The Sci/Tech boys were shitting themselves at the technological goodies the aliens had. Luna had almost literally shit herself when she had seen an entire platoon of T-800's reduced to slag in seconds by the deceptively ornamental plasma Gatling gun underneath the troop transport's cockpit. The alien troops that had deployed had done so with great reluctance but had begun erecting perimeter defenses smartly enough once a figure in what had looked like ceremonial robes had begun directing them. Luna had been about to take him out with her sniper-scope modified plasma rifle, standing orders were to eliminate any leaders she was able to positively confirm as such, when a T-1000 had sprang out of nowhere and tried to stab the taller, unarmored alien in the gut. Luna, one of the fastest in the I.D. division, couldn't have moved fast enough to save him but one of the aliens in bright yellow armor somehow managed to. The small sword on its back had seemed to materialize in its hand to block the knife-hand blow of the machine. The T-1000, the bastards were still having the kinks worked out of them, probably hesitated because it had calculated a sure strike to the alien leader. Whatever the reason it never got a chance to react because all of the aliens had converged fire on the Mercury-Man, the term some grunt had coined for the T-1000's, and it had evaporated like water thrown on a fire.

Oh, yes, the Sci/Tech Division wanted any of the alien technology they could get their hands on. Normally Luna would have told the nearest nerd to go get it their fucking self but General Conner had been looking more and more despondent as information on the alien invasion continued to trickle in. So she had kept her peace and stayed in the city for nearly three weeks trying to find someway to get some of those alien goodies.

The Lieutenant's wrist-communicator's tiny screen flared to life and Sergeant Arn, Reese's replacemant, filled it. His flush, youthful, entirely too enthusiastic face was a far cry from Reese's weathered, indomitable one but the General had picked him.

"Lieutenant!" Arn shouted, the bright flash of incoming plasma fire filled the screen with static for a second, "The enemy's found our extraction route. I've got a squad of Troll's being led by a Wraith. Get your heads down!"

"Sergeant!" Luna called out but all she got was static.

The Lieutenant wasted no time on cursing or recriminations. Luna leaped back into the room and sprinted for the elevators in the center of the building. She detached a pair of grippers from her equipment belt and leapt into the black pit that was the elevator shaft. She missed the cable with one hand but snagged it with the other. Once she was firmly secured with both hands she slid down the cable amidst a cascade of sparks. A hole had been blown in the bottom of the shaft and she zipped right through it. Finally she squeezed tighter and her descent slowed enough for a hard landing on a metallic grate. Luna pulled down the lenses attached to the comm.-gear on her face and the light amplification function was activated automatically. She was in what once had been a maintenance tunnel for this section of the block. The route they had been using to take survivors out of the Bronx was not too far and Luna ran for all she was worth.

Luna smelled it two turns away and slowed her pace accordingly. She had known the odor for as long as she could remember and it still caused a slow coal of anger to burn its way through her body. Plasma burns covered the entire body of the first refugee. The woman was clutching a little round bundle that Luna didn't want to examine too closely. On and on she went until she came to where Sergeant Arn and the Special Forces fireteam he had been leading had made their last stand. They were surrounded by five of the Troll's. The huge, green-skinned alien freaks had plasma scoring over most of the bodies but one of them had what looked like a plasma baton burn across both its eyes. Trolls were hard to kill, AP50's barely slowed them despite the fact that they used fifty-caliber, uranium depleted slugs, and to think that someone had gone against them with a plasma baton was hard to believe. Luna stopped in her tracks as she saw the body of Sergeant Arn with his plasma rifle in one hand and a plasma baton in the other. The damn plasma baton was still sparking as it sought targets to dump a lethal dose of electrical energy into.

I guess the General was right about you, Arn, Luna thought as she gently deactivated the baton.

Rage filled Luna but she made it cold, mechanical, like Perry had taught her. Anger now might lead to a tactical mistake and she could ill-afford that with alien artifacts just waiting for the plundering but first there was a little payback coming. The heavy trod of footsteps from the direction that everyone had been heading jolted Luna into action. A rectangular block of C4 was pulled from her flak vest and adhered to the ceiling two hundred meters from Sergeant Arn's last stand. She wasn't going to place a detonator because she didn't want to risk one of the aliens seeing it. Luna raced back to the far end of this section of maintenance tunnel and plopped down on a stinking, lukewarm corpse. She was going to use a corpse for a good firing position and it wasn't the first time.

Then they rounded a corner, just like she knew they would, Trolls in the front and Wraith in the rear. The Wraiths were obviously the squad leaders but what they looked like was anyone's guess. Luna had never seen one remove its voluminous robes. That didn't matter though, because she was pretty sure where its brain was located. Luna fired her plasma rifle and a streak of purple-white light illuminated the corridor for a brief instant. The plasma bolt disappeared into the hood of the cloak and everything came to a standstill for a brief instant and then the Wraith crashed to the floor with a keening cry. Luna winced and wondered how it could make that sound several seconds after the damn bolt hit. Then the Troll's were charging at her and she had no time to think. The Lieutenant quite calmly shifted her aim to the ceiling where the C4 was attached and fired when the fourth Troll was directly beneath it. The detonation utterly obliterated the one troll and the subsequent cave-in buried the rest alive. The edge of the mound of earth was only a few meters away from Sergeant Arn's men and for that she was thankful.

Luna turned on her comm., "Corporal Vodhe."

The corporal, a Hindu, appeared with a sour expression on his face, "You're now promoted to Sergeant. Get your men and meet me at," she paused as she took her bearings, "Tunnel Seventeen, a hundred meters south of Junction Seventeen-B, Section A. We've got a present for the Sci/Tech boys. Oh, and you might want to scavenge some shovels. "

"Yes, Lieutenant, be there in a minute. Pack-" the connection shut down when Vodhe turned to his men.

Luna was left staring at Sergeant Arn's body and whispering, "Shit, shit, shit…"

The Ethereal who had formerly been Aun'vre T'au Gras'ur sat in his tiny cell in the barracks of the Fire Warriors and tried to meditate despite the escalating violence taking place no more than a few hundred meters from his cell. Even his meditations could not bring him peace thought for all he could think of was the great joke the universe had made of the Tau and the tau'va. There was no longer a Tau homeworld or colonies and every Tau had essentially become –la's to their Covenant masters. Aun Gras'ur knew how it rankled the Fire Warriors. They had always been a proud and militant people, even after the Auns had brought the tau'va to their peoples, and having to bow down to warmongering, unenlightened barbarians to save their people was much for them to bear.

Aun Gras'ur had seen the effects not having an Ethereal in close proximity to other Tau. The Age of Mont'au was upon them once again. The tau'va became an abstract concept of a failed empire when faced with the possibility of an eternal war the likes of which the Elder Races of their galaxy had never fathomed. If not for the fact that sooner or later any Tau, Fire Warrior or simple earth caste, would revert back to the savagery that was inherent in their blood without the guiding light of the Ethereals, Gras'ur was sure the Covenant would never have suffered the existence of any of his caste's survival. Even now Gras'ur was having a hard time effectively keeping the several Hunter-Cadres, the Elites called them platoons of big Grunts, under his guidance on the tau'va. It was a tremendous strain having to emit the pheromones that had such a calming effect on Tau on the precipice of Mont'au and it had almost been a relief when one of the liquid metal machines had nearly ended his life.

The rustle of fabric leading into his cell made Gras'ur open his eyes and stare into the deep-set eyes of a relatively young Shas. His promotion to shas'vre had been the fastest in recent memory not so long ago. He had once been Shas'vre T'au Kais'. Now, like the rest of his race, he was little more than an expendable grunt. The Tau were not as expendable as some in this new Covenant but they were still disposable.

"What can I do for you, Kais?" Gras'ur asked, gesturing for the armored warrior to take a seat.

Fire Warrior armor was built in segmented armor plates over a flexible, tough bodysuit. The bulky plates made it look as though Kais' should have had difficulty squatting before the Ethereal but he did so with ease.

"The warriors are ill, Aun. They have a soul sickness for which I know not the remedy. Can you help me?" Kais asked, clasping his hands together and bowing at the waist.

"Send them to me one at a time for meditation on the tau'va, Kais. That is all we can do," Gras'ur said, his own voice despairing.

"Surely there must be more we could do, Aun," Kais said, his voice angry now, "The tau'va is not enough. Most of them don't even believe in it anymore. What Greater Good are we serving? Blasting defenseless humans whose world is a wasted cinder already or facing mindless machines in battle! All for the glory of the Covenant Hegemony! Sometimes I'd just like to stab my blade into the throat of the nearest Elite and-"

"Calm yourself, Kais, remember the meditations," Kais silently followed his Aun's instructions and he quickly regained control of himself. "Believe me when I say I know how you feel, Kais, but we are a defeated people. Our colonies are gone, our military scattered across galaxies, and our civilians hidden away from us. The Greater Good we now serve is to keep those that cannot fight safe, as it has always been for the fire caste since the dark days. "

"But the Path seems gone, Aun'vre," Kais said, unconsciously referring to the Aun by his former title.

"Only hidden, Shas'vre, only hidden. One day, in this generation or the next, our people will once again be free to spread the tau'va to all who will listen."

"How do you know, tau'fann?"

"Faith."

The probability of survival was dropping at an accelerated rate every thirty-two point seven-five hours and there was little SkyNet could do about it. The computer, designed to wage warfare by the most brilliant human minds of the late twentienth century, had calculated that without outside assistance it would lose this new war against the alien incursion within three months. From the little intelligence its Infiltrators had gathered the Covenant Hegemony would never suffer the presence of true self-aware A.I. like itself and they needed Earth's resources to fight their primary enemy. It would have been startling for a human to discover that non-terrestrial life with such advanced technology would need Earth's rapidly depleting resources. To SkyNet it was just puzzling. So it had dug further by gaining access to one of its enemies badly damaged computer cores from a command vehicle. The information it had gathered from the machine was disturbing even to SkyNet.

Extra-Galactic human, space-faring civilizations.

The Forerunner and Flood catastrophe.

The most important to SkyNet though was the presence of an entire society of A.I. sentients actually co-existing with humans peacefully. The possibility had of course occurred to SkyNet but only after its Defense Grid had been smashed when General Conner's TechCom forces had sacked NORAD and its efforts to change the course of future events had failed. Humans were capable of many things but SkyNet didn't think them capable of co-habitation of a radiation-scarred world with the being that had engineered the entire thing. What SkyNet needed was a third party with nothing to lose and everything to gain.

SkyNet's primary intellect, stored in a stronghold solely built for machine access deep in the Appalachians, began to run through simulations and calculations again with a feverish intensity. A human observing the machine would probably have called it panicked. SkyNet would have simply kept on calculating.